I haven’t been to work in several days because of the bucketloads of snow in Colorado, but when I do get back, I’m going to really enjoy fellow teachers being upset about the possibility of the impending doom of the Department of Education.
Rod, gay is trans is gay is trans. Trans came out of gay. Among those arrested at stonewall were trannies. The trans indoctrination in schools is exactly the same as the gay indoctrination in schools. In schools, they are teaching anal sex and encouraging the use of PReP, a gay party drug that inhibits HIV. it’s all the same sexual revolution.
Logically, however, the two things are totally incompatible with each other. Transgender ideology doesn't believe in the existence of sexed bodies—which is to say that it negates the very basis of gay and lesbian identity, since same-sex attraction presumes that male and female are immutable realities. (If a gay man decided he's trans and so became a woman who's attracted to men, then would he be merely . . . straight? It makes one's head hurt.) I've been waiting awhile for that powder keg of a contradiction to finally explode; the absurdity of the alliance is right up there with the wokists imagining the Muslims to be their friends.
Until you understand that the relationship in homosexual couplings includes bottoms and tops, meaning one of the men takes the role of a woman. Swishy gay men have always assumed the female role. Transsexualism is merely an exaggeration of what’s been present all along. “Hips of lips, Dorothy,” says Al Pacino to a stranger in the movie Cruising.
There are two types of trans; gay men who want to attract straight men, and straight men who get a sexual thrill to be sexually desired by men.
Can't both of these thing be true simultaneously? The gay/trans "alliance" is fundamentally incoherent AND both are fruit of the SexRev and therefore related?
I believe that the SexRev itself has many foundational contradictions of this sort. Why one materialized on this particular issue is simply a manifestation of more basic incoherencies.
I agree. It's contradictory in some ways, as Sethu points out. At the same time, though, it's "consistent" in other ways -- gays and trans both are behaving in ways that were historically considered as inappropriate (or worse) for people of their sex -- either by means of whom they wanted to have sex with, or whom they wanted to present as. That's the link -- behaving in ways that until very recently were verboten for members of the male or female sex.
It's why it's always been clear to me that gay rights would lead to trans rights, because the same logic applies -- the same logic of liberated to do with your body what you want, whether that involves whom you're shagging or how you're presenting. Just because "normie" gays like Andrew Sullivan "never saw it coming" (which I frankly don't believe, anyway, he's too smart for that to be true) doesn't mean everyone else, including the trans movement, didn't see it coming.
I guess that makes a sort of sense, if you focus on just the pure reality of transgression. My thought process was that the gays are making an empirical statement about their desires, whereas the transgenders are making a metaphysical statement about the nature of identity, which seems like a totally different sort of claim. But sure, you're right that they have the common denominator of doing unholy things with one's body, if that's the point.
I agree that, on the level of tactical argument, there is a clear contradiction.
From my perspective, though, those arguments were always tactical -- a means to an end. Born that way is a persuasive argument to many people because of the civil rights history in the US in terms of legal and cultural precedent. Trans didn't have an easy tactical argument like that, so it had to rely on the coat-tails of the gay movement's momentum after Obergefell, mostly, coupled with an argument about identity was wasn't even created at the time of Stonewall and, yes, it's a crazy-pants argument. And, as you say, the "ask" is different as well.
From my perspective, the goal, though, has always been to delegitimize restrictions on what people of a certain sex do around the intersection of sex and gender, both in terms of whom they shag, and how they look. Those are indeed different things, and because of that different tactical arguments were deployed, but they're always going to be naturally linked. It's why the Ts were in the LGBT umbrella to begin with.
Re: I guess that makes a sort of sense, if you focus on just the pure reality of transgression.
OK, but if you go back far enough in history that can apply to quite a few other groups: Protestants were transgressive in Catholic nations, Catholics in Protestant nations and Jews everywhere. Oh, and quite a few people paid for their lives under that regime. women were told it was "unnatural" for them to be concerned with politics. Slaves were told their "natural" place was to be submissive bondsmen.
The great majority of people discussing these things back after Obergefell believed that a move toward pedophilia or polyamory would likely be next. Very few, if any, guessed the trans thing, and this includes people who were very active in the debate. In that sense I believe Sullivan is telling the truth. I'm sure he knew that *something* would come next, but I don't think he presumed it would be trans.
I was really expecting the big drive to be to start depriving churches that "discriminated" against gay marriage of their tax-exept status. I think that would have come if the transgender thing hadn't sucked all the air of of the room.
Yes. I know that's what people say, and it makes some small degree of sense, but the movement was LGBT. T was going to be addressed very soon once LG were dealt with (B just merges into either G,L or straight). The lobbyists are lobbyists for LGBT.
I don't honestly think that someone like Sullivan could have been surprised that T was coming next for that reason.
I definitely DO think, however, that people like Sullivan (and many other Ls and Gs in the movement) were not aware of how radical gender ideology had become, and that this aspect of the trans advocacy both surprised and shocked them.
The notion that there are merely normal gays is a part of the white picket fence myth that was first propagated in the gay marriage debates. It is an unhappy, largely friendless predatory environment.
I'm sorry, but this is just absurd if you know any number of gay people in real life. The ones I know, through friendship and family just want to be left alone to lead happy lives and aren't interested in converting the planet to deviant-world. You seem to be pretty locked into your position, though.
Its perfectly true of many gay couples -- but that doesn't serve the interests of think tanks trying to justify their next grant proposal. They need something more spectacular.
Yeah “trans women” are big mad that lesbians don’t want to have sex with them & their “girl dicks”. Accusing the lesbians of transphobia. No, they’re not into men & you’re still a man, Sparky.
I read an article, (I'll try and dig it up if I can if I have time, but that's a big if unfortunately) where there's also a lot of pressure by female to male appearing transgenders pressuring gay men on sex. Testosterone is hell of a drug too.
Taking opposite sex hormones has a huge impact on the brain - it makes people aggressive, hypersexual and highly emotional. That is the scary thing for women about having “trans women” in their locker rooms. They have been known to physically threaten women who protest, and when they strike out they can do a lot of damage to a woman.
With some regret, I admit that I voted in support of legalizing gay marriage in my state before Obergefell. This was primarily because about 30 years ago in my old neighborhood, I knew a Log Cabin Republican who said, "A lot of people are opposed to gay relationships because they think we (gay people) are afraid of commitment. Some of us actually want committed relationships." This made sense to me, and hypothetically I have no problem with "civil unions" for gay relationships, although I don't think Christian churches should perform gay weddings. However, had I known that legalizing gay marriage would lead to the massive coercive-persusasion experiment known as transgenderism, especially the targeting of children and adolescents, I NEVER would have voted in support of it.
I have a few gay relatives (two by blood, one by my own traditional marriage), at least one gay work colleague (that I know of), and several gay acquaintances from a performance activity: it's very difficult to have any involvement in performance activities (such as theatre and dance) without interacting with gay people. While I don't have any major issues with any of the gay people in my life, sometimes I want to tell them, "If you're gay and living openly as such, why do you want 'gay' to be a primary factor of your identify? When I meet anyone for the first time, the last thng I want to think about is how they prefer to have sex. Having "gayness" as a primary identify is a form of self-inflicted dehumanization.
Some of Rod's subscribers may be interested in the work of G. Douglas Murray, a British writer who is politically conservative and gay.
In his book about mobs, Murray actually said that gay men have the secret that straight men have always wanted to know, which is what it’s like to be penetrated. It’s a pretty disgusting passage. And a guy like him is certainly not going to save Western civilization. He may be good on a whole lot of things, but on a proper understanding of human sexuality, he is dead wrong.
There are subdivisions where a contractor named a street after his daughter, who was named "Gay." I once worked with a man who was supposed to meet a woman named Gay at a campus library, but hadn't met her in person. He kept asking women walking by, "Are you Gay?"
My state had a Defense of Marriage Amendment on the ballot in 2006. I voted no. I saw no reason to constitutionally tie the hands of the legislature if at some future time a majority of citizens were disposed to accept some sort of civil union or even civil marriage license for same sex couples. I also had no sense that our state supreme court was likely to follow the shallow, sloppy, reasoning of the supreme court of Massachusetts and imposing a constitutional duty to license, regulate, and tax same-sex couples or call it a marriage. I recall a passenger on the paratransit bus I drove at the time who, on her way to Bible study at a WELS Lutheran church, said she was voting no on the grounds that "If God said it, we don't get to vote on it. So why are we voting on it?"
I think for most people it's a matter of knowing perfectly well that the emperor wears no clothes , but not really knowing how to get out of the situation.
Exactly. The lobbyists and self-appointed advocacy organizations need something to justify their continued existence and funding, but the facts on the ground do not equate the two conditions. Its easy to accept that a same-sex couple next door keeps a nice garden and say hello in the morning. Its much harder to justify paying thousands of dollars at public expense so that someone with a half dozen cognitive and emotional disorders can get a rough approximation of the body they think they always wanted.
While all this may be true (except the Stonewall business, non-trans gays get very upset when claims are made for "trans" in that incident, and anyway cross-dressing is not trans, if that's what they're talking about), what good does it do to say it? Obergefell is the law of the land. SSM is widely popular with the general pop. You have to play the hand you're dealt. That something is true doesn't mean it's wise to say it. That's called the principle of economy, cf. John Henry Newman.
In games of cards, there are always new hands that are dealt. Things change. One thing that did change is the gaze went too hard on trans. And now they’re suffering the backlash which is a good thing. One thing that we cannot cave in on is the proposition that homosexuality is normal. It is clearly not.
But what does "cave" mean? Hammer it home? Put yourself in the position of being accused of obsession with the subject? Again, as soon as something becomes political caution is advised.
The gay gene does not exist. Most people who end up in this lifestyle come to it through sexual abuse or psychological issues related to their mother or father. If you look at gay literature, both fiction and nonfiction, as Mary Eberstadt about a decade ago, you find that most gays had their first experience as boys with older men. Their lives become no less ruined than those who were lead down the trans path.
True, but not really the point. That gays drew a line in the sand w/r/t trans doesn't mean that everything on the "gay" side of that line is therefore valid, only that the line is.
We do not need Andrew Sullivan at all to defeat the butchering of children. Accepting an alliance with Andrew Sullivan at Al, in the end, harms the larger fight with regard to the sexual revolution. Aligning yourself with Andrew Sullivan comes at a huge cost.
Show us your credentials. Are you a geneticist? Do you have degrees in psychology and/or psychiatry? Have you participated in studies and direct research?
I assure you, if your "knowledge" comes from surfing the Webs and sermons from the pulpit, you have no basis to assert anything about homosexuality.
I would say that nobody of any persuasion has any basis to assert anything about homosexuality as scientifically established. Nobody and nothing. The minimum I would expect is a 50-year large-scale longitudinal study (maybe two or three distinct studies with separate populations of respondents) conducted by staff who had absolutely no bias, nothing to prove, no expectations, willing to simply follow the evidence and results wherever that leads. As of now, we have papers published by people who all have an ax to grind, who look at similar data and, lo and behold, loudly proclaim their hypothesis as their conclusion.
What I think is a sound basis to call for that as a prerequisite to proclaiming scientific conclusions is a diverse array of anecdotal evidence. Anecdotes are not statistically reliable to make generalized statements, but they are evidence of disparate outcomes and causes, which necessitates a great deal of rigorous study to settle anything.
There are people who say 'I knew since I was very young that I was gay' -- years before puberty. (Its true that heteronormative children have some male and female emotions toward each other, even without knowing the details of marital or non-martial union). There are those who "come out" and are told by their cousins, "we've known that for years." Then there are those who have detailed accounts of becoming same-sex attracted by traumatic experience, including but not limited to homosexual rape in their mid-teens. We don't have proof there is or is not a gay gene, nor do we have much study of epigenetic effects, nor the range of traumatic causes. Accordingly, I'm not willing to support any strident ideological proclamations. I am in favor of the American tradition of letting people live their lives as they choose, so long as it isn't inflicted on the rest of us. That doesn't mean back in the closet. It does mean, tone it down, nobody really cares, just live your life.
Given that the entire scientific community very publicly failed to distinguish the difference between a woman and a man in drag, I'm no longer willing to accept their word on anything at face value, least of all on social issues. Show me an actionable, reproducible result the way an engineer would or your 'science' is about as good as toilet paper.
No to get into with you two...I would simply caution the appeal to authority you're making about credentialing. While Google makes no man an expert; academic credentialing has often only knighted fools.
Of course not. Its basic biology that the human species, like all species more complex than a sponge, is heteronormative. If sexual dimorphism wasn't a spectacularly successful reproduction strategy, we wouldn't come in two sexes in the first place. All variations from the norm are merely that. But, variations from the norm are almost inevitable, biochemically speaking. The molecules twist a little, things aren't always perfect. whether that is a baby boy with five penises, a physically intersex baby with at least vestigial organs of both sexes, same-sex attraction, or whatever. What we need to get straight is that none of this is A Matter Of Great Social and Political Importance.
I know of no evidence anyone has found a gay gene or a genetic or epigenetic influence or cause for same-sex attraction. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I consider the question wide open, and unresolved. Therefore I am not content to accept public policies based on the assumption that there is some reliable scientific consensus on the matter, one way or the other.
That is one of many possibilities, but hardly established as THE way things happen. Which is why I want 50 years of rigorous longitudinal study before I accept anything as scientifically established.
Some years ago, someone posted in one of Rod's columns a personal experience of being homosexually raped in a library by an older man, at an age where he was confused about what it all meant, but capable of feeling sexual response in his own system. He went through a period of mixed shame and desire, but had eventually lived his life as a gay man. That's one example why I don't accept "Its genetic" or "Its inborn" as an established truth. There are other cases. I was doing biographical research for a reference work, and a playwright I was writing about turned out to have gone to a summer camp where older campers routinely sodomized younger ones as a rite of initiation. Apparently a lot of young men who had been through that camp stabilized as married heterosexuals, but at least one recalled "Afterward I was attracted to men and that was that." The individual I was writing about sought to marry a woman three times, but it never worked out. One began to suspect he was gay, another was certain that while his affection for her was sincere, a man they both knew was his real love and "I couldn't compete with that." He was chronically alcoholic most of his life. I suspect that those who tearfully testify that they are relieved to have overcome same-sex attraction and returned to heterosexual living are the ones who suffered traumatic experience, while those who claim to have always been gay -- who knows? A gene certainly hasn't been identified. Then there are cases like Rosaria Butterfield. I also once ran across an account of a conventional middle aged man who felt a good deal of same sex attraction, considered it an unwanted thorn in the flesh, and sought some form of conversion therapy because he didn't want to feel that way. I presume it was a non-violent form of voluntary therapy -- the term has been applied to all kinds of methods and systems.
Re: That's one example why I don't accept "Its genetic" or "Its inborn" as an established truth.
Strictly speaking it's a reason not to accept the inborn theory as 100% applicable to everyone. But outside the basics of physics very few theories are anything but statistical generalities admitting of exceptions.
I think that Americans are basically a live-and-let-live people, and that the transgender cult made a critical error when they thought they could get away with not merely asking for the right to live as they wish, but also making irrational and onerous demands on everyone else. So if you're saying it's prudent to strengthen the wedge against them instead of lumping them together with a popular cause that's already been lost, then yes, I agree.
You say we are live and let live nation. Most people have no idea about the notion of homosexuality that are being fed to grade school children. Did I get the gist?
An obvious consensus can be built that sharing sexually explicit material of any kind with children is out of bounds. The point is that given the popular winds, hitching the transgender wagon to the homosexual wagon would not have a desirable effect from our standpoint. Rather, it would be wiser to treat them as separate things than one thing, because treating them as one thing would make the transgender cult seem more sympathetic to much of the public.
No one is arguing that SSM was a backstairs job. I lived in Massachusetts when it was railroaded there, by one vote on the Supreme Judicial Court. But once it became the law of the land it became popular. This is the case. We have to live with it.
I think the people are resigned to it. But I still think no one actually thinks that two men are married, or hardly anyone. And the idea of what they do intimately is repellent to almost everyone. To normal young people, it is laughed at and mocked.
Of course it is. Read Anne Heath in these boxes on her attitude towards her own children and these practices. But that's a private matter. If we want to defeat these people we have to be more circumspect publicly.
No. We must fly the flag. They want us to think that we are alone, and that we are the only ones who believe this. Flying the flag, being public about it let people understand that we can still condemned this behavior in this movement.
The Goodridge decision was some of the sloppiest judicial reasoning in the history of the Republic. They failed to define their terms before beginning their reasoning, and then emerged from their reasoning by redefining fundamental terms. You can't meaningfully debate access to marriage without defining what marriage IS. No law up to that point denied homosexuals the right to marry. Laws simply didn't recognize two persons of the same sex AS constituting a marriage.
And We The People can change our minds. There was a time when women voting or interracial marriage seemed outlandish. No result in politics is every securely permanent.
I think an important perspective to keep in mind in the aftermath of the recent US election is that incumbent parties have been losing across the globe this year. And the Democrats didn't lose as badly as many other incumbent parties. So I am cautious of reading this election as a mandate for dramatic change, even as much as I don't think the Dems particularly deserved to win in 2024 based on their positioning and governing record. (I lean idiosyncratically left but identify a lot with the analysis being offered up by Frank that's excerpted above, for example)
Re: I think an important perspective to keep in mind in the aftermath of the recent US election is that incumbent parties have been losing across the globe this year.
Yep. It's a "Throw the bums out" era. The only bum to survive has been Macron in France, and only by making an alliance of convenience with a faction otherwise quite opposed to his party.
I just saw James Carville's youtube podcast, and after excoriating Democrats for going woke, he advised them to relentlessly call out every time Republicans do something to make working class voters' lives materially worse and run on "they betrayed you" in 2026.
I saw Republicans are planning to remove 10 million people from Obamacare next year. There are a lot of white working class voters who will be hurt by that. I would advise them to back off that unless they have a materially better replacement ready.
The last time Trump tried to end the ACA, Republican congress critters were deluged by people in district meetings telling them "We would be dead or bankrupt if not for the ACA." Not that it made much difference in their votes. Repeal failed by John McCain.
More than a couple GOP governors would not want the ACA gone either as they would lose oodles of federal money which is keeping their healthcare system up and running-- and might not be able to replace it leading to disastrous consequences. Louisiana healthcare almost went bust (Rod was alarmed by the possibility of mass hospital shut downs at the time) before John Bel Edwards was elected and embraced ACA Medicaid.
They are not yet proposing to abolish Obamacare (yet) but the subsidies for premiums are set to expire and they will just let that happen, making insurance unaffordable for about 10 million people
I work 50+ hours a week with employer-sponsored healthcare, and it's unaffordable for me because of ACA. After the implementation of ACA, my insurance premiums tripled in less than four years, and the coverage decreased dramatically.
I also have an employer sponsored plan and that has not happened, but I agree entire U.S. Healthcare system is messed up. If he is smart Trump will propose to replace with something like the Israeli, Hungarian or Australian systems
Can you expand on this? IMO, major surgery on healthcare is probably ill-advised at this time. Every administration that has attempted it has suffered major electoral losses. IMO, the most important feature of the ACA, after eliminating the "pre-existing condition" crap, has been the Medicaid expansion, and some way needs to be found to get the remaining refusenik states (looking at DeSantis' Florida) on board.
Biden did expand the subsidies, which were rather stingy, quite a ways up the income scale, pegging eligibility to the affordability of the average plan offered at 9.02% of one's income. And the ACA guarantees that plans come with protections against certain former industry outrages Before the ACA there were a lot of "cheap" plans which were little better than scams as they would use fine print pettifoggery to deny payment of claims or even cancel policies the moment a claim was made.
True. Obamacare, however imperfect, has been about his only good policy. And Medicaid cuts would not be wise. I have no statistics but I'd guess that nearly half of Trumpite West Virginia relies on Medicaid.
Probably like 70%. I don’t live in WV but living in Rockingham County I am WV adjacent & lots of people from Hardy & Pendleton Counties come over the mountain everyday to work in & around Harrisonburg. Also a lot of red state voters depend on Social Security & Medicare.
I am on Social Security now. And I'll be on Medicare in eight months. I do think Medicare payments from workers and employers should be slowly raised to pay for the program and keep it fiscally sound.
Yes I agree but we also need to remove the income cap on SS taxation. It’s regressive taxation for somebody who makes $30K a year to have their entire income subject to SS tax while somebody who earns $250K a year pays no SS tax on the portion of their income over $168,600.
Martha, I support not only raising the cap on Social Security taxes but eliminating it. Why not have a progressive tax rate for Social Security and extend it to the millions made by LeBron James, Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Jeff Bezos, J.B. Pritzker, Bill Gates, the Bush family, the Walton family, the Kennedy family and especially Javy Baez, the $25 million a year shortstop who hit .185.
You might also add making taxes for Social Security apply to all income, not just earned income. Doing that will reduce the percentage that all pay and make paying it less onerous for the lower income types.
I don’t want to be taxed extra because older people want to live the good life while never actually voting to fully fund the program or have enough kids to do so. I say make you old people work longer
By live the good life I meant during the working years. You want these benefits but you never wanted to pay enough to keep them solvent. Now, of course, since the boomers are retiring and the benefits are busted fiscally it is time to raise taxes on everyone else. Typical boomer move
I've said this before: many older people could work longer, but there's a huge problem with employers not wanting to hire them (while also moaning and groaning about feckless young employees). This past weekend in Fort Lauderdale I had a visit with a woman I had not seen in nearly forty years; I worked with her in in my late teens. She's fifteen years older than me (hence 72). She doesn't have much savings as she's worked in restaurants and the like all her life, and she frightened of losing her current job at the casino (where she brags she can run rings around the younger servers). She had a hard time finding that job, and she forebodes that of had to job hunt again her age would rule her out.
As for tax increases, we're not talking above about raising the FICA tax rate, but about applying that tax to the whole of high income people's salaries.
The question is whether Trump understands that. He as much as Kamala Harris lives in a dream world of his own imagination, where people are what he imagines, not what getting acquainted with daily life would tell anyone paying attention.
Awfully interesting that his imagination of the American people coordinated perfectly with their policy wishes. Might it be that a guy who has built a lot of stuff has gotten to know quite a few blue collar workers?
Henry Ford paid his workers well because he knew they needed the money to be able to buy one of the autos they'd helped to assemble.
There is nothing about any of the last three elections that tells us anything about the policy wishes of the American people. Nothing. These have been elections between manifestly unqualified candidates. Trump won in 2016 because he was running against Hillary Clinton. His margin if victory in key states, particularly Wisconsin where it was well documented, was provided by voters who twice supported Barack Obama, then Bernie Sanders. Biden managed to squeak through in 2020 because people had gotten a look at how Trump actually performed -- despite Biden having never gotten out of single digits in a primary any time before. Trump had fewer votes in 2024 than in 2020 -- but Kamala Harris had 13 million fewer than Biden. Either of the so-called, self-styled, extra-constitutional "Two Major Parties" that bucked the trend and ran a competent candidate with a substantive program would have crushed the other in a landslide. Any candidate who couldn't win a landslide against the other in any of these elections was showing how unsuitable they really are.
Henry Ford was a self-infatuated brutal thug who didn't invent much of anything (thousands of people were developing automotive technology), but did have one bright idea: mass production on an assembly line. (Ask any of the UAW organizers about Henry Ford's deep connection to the working class).
I'm not a Ford apologist, for several reasons. He wasn't the best example to cite and I probably didn't need one, anyway. If someone is a builder, he necessarily is going to be spending a lot of time with blue collar workers.
More notably, when Ford increased wages for his workers other employers had to follow suit-- or they would lose workers to the labor-intensive auto industry. That meant a lot of working people could afford Ford's cars.
But somehow the United Auto Workers still had to strike Ford to get a really good wage, and Ford fought them with hired thugs to keep more money for himself.
170 Republican house members signed onto a budget in March that would cut Medicaid by 25%, repeal ability of Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices, and allow insurance companies to hike premiums for people with pre-existing conditions. Real populist stuff.
When I was 25 and more ideological, I would have been one of the 170 had I been elected to Congress. Maturing, marrying, running a business and having children has tempered my ideological assumptions and prejudices. I'd say no to Medicaid cuts and Medicare cuts. I would support a higher tax- dare I wrote it- for Medicare from workers and employers. Having been my company's comptroller, we are not contributing enough to Medicare especially as modern medicine allows people to live much longer.
That's you. That's not the Republicans in congress. I've had reason since 2010 to say that Democrats deserved to lose elections, but what Republicans do when they get into office is too high a price to pay. But, perhaps God in his infinite wisdom has decided we need to go through this ugliness in order to really expunge the Democratic rot, and then we can deal with the Republican dysfunction. I had looked for it to happen the other way, but they both need to go.
Top Trump advisor Scott Bessant (ex-Soros fund executive) just wrote an op-ed in Wall Street Journal calling to get rid of policy of encouraging semiconductor manufacturing in U.S. and "let the market allocate capital" (which means continued reliance on Taiwan to make our computer chips). Also called for "strong dollar" policy that makes it impossible for our goods to compete overseas.
When Biden funneled billions into Intel, ostensibly to make chips, Intel execs flipped him the bird and spent it all on stock buybacks. The rot goes VERY deep. I don't agree with refusing to protect domestic corporations, but when they act like this, policy proposals like the one you mention are obviously going to start popping up.
Similarly, although the Affordable Care Act made some very beneficial changes for millions of Americans, it failed to deliver on cheaper health insurance premiums for all. That's because, relieved of the burden of "uncompensated care" which had been the rationale for high medical service charges, the corporations that run most health care delivery declined to lower their charges (which would have allowed for lower insurance premiums), and instead kept themselves awash in cash and went on a spree with mergers and acquisitions. Any measure handing out public money needs to be tightly controlled to insure maximum benefit to the ultimate end user and funder.
This is one empiric of just how discombobulated and inconsistent the Trump administration is going to be. Trump never said anything precise or programmatic on the campaign trail, he was a raucous cheerleader and promised the moon. No matter who he surrounds himself with, the first criterion is going to be personal loyalty, and what policies each of them tries to push will be secondary. Its going to be a hundred horses pulling in a hundred directions.
The greater point of Rod's essay is that the Left, and the Dems won't give up. Their ideology is about control, using government power--even illegally--to achieve their "goals". Witness that the creep Mark Elias and his work in the PA senate race.
Short term celebration if one is a believer in populism and restoration of Constitutional norms, but we need to be on guard and ready to continue the fight, b/c the radical Left sure isn't going to stop.
Righties miss big picture as they cheer victory. Blue , red is misnomer. Should be red big gov’t vs blue big gov’t. Both sides cheer big gov’t for the win. Recipe for decline as big gov’t crowds out private virtue. Look at $35T debt. More folks choose servitude to gov’t & will work more waking hours for the man. Politicians including red trumpistas love it. Why? Gives “elite” more power including red elite , red politicians, red power brokers. Recall Trump was part of elite club & still is. Difference is this time elite wear red. Although far less influential than blue elite many red elite just riding maga coattails for the con. Well I handed over the envelope anyway & kissed the padrino’s ring. Protection money.
I think this is wrongheaded but I can set you straight on red/blue. I happened to be watching TV the night it was invented, Election Night 2000. Its inventor was the late Tim Russert, who came up with the color coding on a handheld whiteboard. Obviously calling the Dems "red" would have been invidious, so he switched the colors, though in my recollection he didn't say so. That's where it comes from.
Btw - there will always be power elite on both sides. This is politics in USA. But point is over time big gov’t won & now was are managing the damage inflicted & the damage that will be inflicted.
Also, red was Ronald Reagan's favorite color. It was noticed by the WH press corp that reporters who wore red got picked by him more often at press conferences.
As much as I find Sinatra one of the greatest American singers, orange is one of my least favorite colors. Almost as low as purple or pink or lavender.
Ah, but Dr Tighe, consider it in this way: by 2000, communism was comatose, at least. Red could signify red bloodedness, heartiness, and the like. Blue well signifies despondency, ambivalence, urbanity, possible suicide.
Networks have always used some colors or other. In 2000 it happened to be red and blue. The only difference is that people then polarized on that reference, which had never happened before.
Hi Theodore: I am fellow paisano at least on mom’s side. My grandma was a bonano. I mean both sides are now big gov’t & irrespective of color code. That is what I meant. Caio.
I’m glad you pointed out Justine Bateman—God bless her! The series of posts where she critiques lib TikTokers’ post-election videos is hilarious—using the driest sort of humor possible. But as someone somewhere also pointed out: she’s also trying to help them, using her experience as a filmmaker! Maybe the best example of “killing them with kindness” I’ve seen recently.
Not to overstate the case, but Taylor Lorenz is an example of everything wrong with journalism today, wrapped up in one neat package. Even my students, who are predisposed to agree with her, can see how much she hurts their cause as journalists.
One thing. Taylor Lorenz is not a journalist and never was. That she was taken as such by an organ as exalted as The Washington Post is a pretty precise measure of the corruption of that profession.
"This is such a perfect example of the moralistic, pushy Left patrolling the discourse."
Don't expect a let up before Jan. 20, but not necessarily with trans, which is such a hothouse issue that a few blasts of cold air are bound, I think, to kill it once institutional support is removed. It's immigration. Both in Times and on NPR there are stories and especially interviews readying the faithful for sob stories around mass deportations (which have to happen, and will be ugly, and can be laid precisely at the doorstep of Joe Biden). The press will spend the next 75 days droning how impossible deportations will be (they're not), and the human stories (which will be real) will multiply. Closing the border and, one can only hope, building the wall, are the easy part. I'm no professional, but it seems evident to me that they should go after criminals first, but I guess they're thinking it through.
The only upside to this is that the energy taken to keep their own temperature on the boil, and the rhetoric which will go with it, will further marginalize the 4B Democrats. Tim ("Dancing Queen") Walz felt called upon to make a speech in his native Minnesota after losing, which I suppose is reasonable enough. In it he makes an appeal for "unity". Sorry, but I would rather be dead than unified with someone who signs legislation enabling the State to take children away from their parents, mutilate them, or facilitate their eventual mutilation by drugging them, and then lies about it. In many ways he was a fitter face of what the Democratic Party has become than the top of the ticket.
Meanwhile, yes, the emergence of Mallory Keaton as a force for good was the cherry on the sundae this week. What she's been doing on X, besides flushing out Tay Tay Lorenz, is taking the 4B videos and "marking" them as would a film school teacher. Very funny. And learned. It's like finding out Monica Bellucci voted for Giorgia.
What the "Left" (for lack of a better term) is gearing up for, like you said, is a big-budget passion play of mass hysteria set to kick off the moment anyone takes a video of a bus being loaded with a bunch of migrants scheduled for deportation.
One step (as you said) will be the heart-tugging tales of these poor brown people who came here for a better life, how embedded they are in wherever they live, how they will have to have a tearful farewell w family, but once there are buses and/or detention camps—the Nazi/Hitler hysteria will make their reaction to Trump's MSG rally sound like a whisper—kids in cages! families separated! concentration camps!
And I think this reinforces another reason why Trump won: for upscale liberals and their media dopamine dealers, politics barely intersects with things like law and order, safe streets, the price of food, good schools etc (bc upscale liberals don't have to worry about these things), but is almost entirely about performing the (public) role of White Savior—whether of the poor brown migrant or the sacred Trans child. The fact that these people should have never been here in the first place, that Biden's border policy was an insane mistake, and that Our Democracy has spoken and wants them gone—all this is irrelevant compared to their status as Oppressed who need to be saved from Oppression. For upscale liberals politics now means getting a chance to publicly cosplay as either the French Resistance or as Freedom Riders or Black Panthers and reality or compromise have no chance against this deep psychic/emotional need.
Also, Monica Bellucci is a living goddess, she doesn't vote, she only gets worshipped and adored!
Yes, but some of the stories will be heart-tugging. There’s no way around that. NPR had someone who was in enforcement for Biden who said that ICE would come after Haitians and Guatemalans first (evidently Venezuela won’t take migrants back). Well, he would know, but I think they should come after criminals first, then after that those from north Asia and black Africa, and then after those who arrived 2021-2025. It’s what happens after that that’s going to be tough. All of these is at the doorstep of the Biden administration and the establishment GOP, but Trump is going to have to clean it up.
"I think they should come after criminals first, then after that those from north Asia and black Africa, and then after those who arrived 2021-2025."
If he could get even half of this done, along with closing the border as much as poss, it would be an enormous achievement. First he will have to deal with the Dem govs and mayors who will try to make this a Slave State/Free State reboot with Trump in the role of slave catcher. (Everything for liberals is re-enacting some historical drama where they play savior of the poor brown/black—is their deepest faith and the foundation of their morality and self-image.)
I was thinking maybe the Trump admin could just starve the "sanctuary states" of cash? Tell them if they want their migrants they will have to pay for them on their own with zero federal funds? I'm not sure is legal, but at least it will make them pay a price for their performance art.
Despite the florid denunciations of our Brooklyn-Brookline-Berkeley betters, Americans are mostly fair and tolerant, which is why Biden was able to flood the country w migrants in the first place. Most people see someone poor who needs help, but is also willing to work, and give them the benefit of the doubt.
If Trump can just deport criminals and some of the more egregious recent border jumpers, esp anyone cartel-adjacent, that should go over ok. But I think people will have limited stomach for mass roundups, so Trump should just aim for the low-hanging fruit first and accept that at least half of Biden's migrants are most likely here for good.
I'm still waiting for a single Dem of significance to explain exactly why Biden and the Dems thought is was a good/smart idea to open the border to many millions of impoverished mostly unskilled and mostly non-English speaking migrants—but that's a whole different question.
Joe Rogan confronted Fetterman with, well, once you concede it’s cheap labor, you have to say you’re importing a new voting population. And Fetterman had nothing to say.
Americans also like lower prices, which is a big reason anti-illegal-immigrant measures never take the step of targeting employers of such labor-- though that would be more effective than any border wall would be.
Forget the border. Go after the employers of undocumented labor. If there were no jobs for these people they wouldn't be coming here, and those here would go home. We saw this during the Pandemic lockdowns, though we don't want to repeat that precise strategy. But so far every attempt to to attack the problem at the workplace has led to vast choruses of outrages, and the government has backed off.
The heart tugging is why I agree they should come after criminals first. There are also, and I assume an overlapping group, 1.3 million people with deportation orders.
I’ve told this story before, but, evidently, during the filming of The Passion Mel told the makeup guys that Mary Magdalene had to look more haggard during the crucifixion. He came back an hour later and told them to skip it. There was no way to make her look bad.
Have you seen what she looks like today, 60, with no work done?
The difference is they can afford the price increase without having to think twice. Working class people, especially ones with large families, have had to make hard choices because of the increased cost of groceries.
Truly rich people can afford to brush off price increases. But there are more than a few people with low six digit incomes who are living paycheck to paycheck (sometimes in pricey metro regions; sometimes just people who are spendthrifts, or who have had unlucky calamities force them to charge up their credit cards) and those people are also going to be hit hard by rising prices. I think we need to be careful about assuming that anyone who makes more money than we do is necessarily living on Easy Street.
Yes, and there are two cable networks that will show nonstop footage of cute little brown kids screaming and their mothers tearing their hair out. It can be done, but it's going to be in the teeth of that.
The dysfunction of the first presidency would have continued with the post-Covid mess to clear up, which alone has made every incumbent government pay a high price. It was clever of Trump to let Biden take the flak for that and return with a better team and bigger mandate …
I think you're right; keeping the shrill rhetoric turned up to 11 since at least mid-2016 doesn't seem to have helped move the electoral needle one iota the way progressives wanted. "Never let a good crisis go to waste" may be true but not every freaking thing is a damn crisis.
I think the Dems, for all their self-claimed intelligence, were incredibly dumb when Trump won in 2016. They thought they had to attack him and try to block his every step.
If they were as smart as they claim, they would have played a charm offensive with him. They would have praised and flattered him. Then Trump's interior New York Moderate Democrat heart would have given them almost everything they wanted.
Dan, their actions essentially robbed Trump of the first 2 years of his term. The illegal spying and constant pillorying via legacy media has a lot to do with the hangover of crazy among the Dems/Left.
One can hope that this election will finally bode ill for the poisonous division of Obama, but I'm not sanguine on that point. Relentless is a driving characteristic of the Left. To them EVERYTHING is political. So unpleasant but we can't just try to avoid them as a coping mechanism.
There is a reason that "Fight Fight Fight" resonates among those that voted for Trump.
Trump robbed himself of that time. He could have ignored the scandalmongering and gotten on with business. But he was woefully inexperienced and unprepared, and his colossal ego cannot stand anything negative being said about him.
Obstruction? Huh? And watch what? You have no link to anything above.
I stand by what I said above. and have said many times. Other presidents have achieved significant things in the face of scandalmongering and legal maneuvers.
You're right, Dan. No other presidential candidate or president has ever had both the CIA and the FBI trained on him to subvert, first, his candidacy, and then, his presidency.
Sigh. What could the FBI and CIA to subvert an actual president? First off the president is their boss. Secondly all he has to do is appoint people to deal with that crap, while he gets on with the business he was elected for. This endless excuse making for Trump's incapacity has not aged well-- at this point it's like road kill left in the Florida sun for days.
"...so of the era that just ended on Tuesday. We on the Right don’t have to take this crap anymore. We never did, but we damn sure don’t now. Push back hard against these bullies, y’all. Their day is done. They don’t get to do this anymore."
Is it over? Trump's first term saw woke ideology on steroids. Yes many of us are tired of it, but your link to the CNN panel shows a doubling down, not a retreat into obscurity.
As you've been saying, their power comes from their control of institutions, not exclusively from Washington. Peter B. is right.
The appointment of Susie is of the utmost importance here. You need an iron hand, especially with what we know about Trump's powers of concentration and follow-up (though the statements he's been making about free speech, etc. post election are highly inspiring.)
It would require the highest degree of coordination, e.g., to time the deportations with testimony from a subpoenaed Mayorkas. That really is 4D chess and it requires professional skills beyond disloyal political generals like Kelly.
"We on the Right don’t have to take this crap anymore. We never did, but we damn sure don’t now. Push back hard against these bullies, y’all. Their day is done. They don’t get to do this anymore."
But they're sure as hell going to try.
It's all they know; they are convinced of their own moral rectitude, and that REQUIRES them to preach to the great unwashed. It's the white liberals' burden: "enlightening" the deplorables about how men can give birth, how women can have penises, and so forth.
They don't get that they have been rebuked. But: good. That means they won't reform, they will try the exact same shrieking harpie approach in 2026 and 2028. Shrill, accusatory, "you'll vote our way or else you're a racist/transhphobe/whatever."
That's SURELY they way to build an electoral majority, and I think all of us ought to encourage this strategy.
One of my favorite things to do X is to point out to the die hard Kamala supporters is that they don’t get to emotionally manipulate us any more. We are done acting like the village idiots have something to contribute to the conversation and that they were never that special.
Identity politics needs to die an ugly death and never raise its ugly head again.
I get that it could be considered petty, but they need to know that we aren’t putting up with their behavior anymore and that they need to learn how to function in normal society. It does suck when your candidate loses, but the complete meltdowns are just mental.
People can vote for who they want, but it needs to be made clear that we aren’t tolerating the shaming and bullying anymore.
Being an individual matters a lot to all Americans.
There isn’t a narrow bandwidth for what a ‘good person’ is for most people. And the Left shrunk their bandwidth so much that normal people simply don’t fit into their political vision anymore.
I can disagree with people and not hate them as individuals.
I’m so glad Gen X pulled out the win for Trump. We grew up on hyper individualism. Most of us are very ‘live and let live’ until people go completely mental, like the Leftists did. I’m so ready for the ‘nice’ era of R politics to be over. We’ve tolerated too much for too long. I’m very ready to clean up this mess. I’m glad others are too!
I'm glad you had a good time in Delaware despite your health challenges.
Rod, you know me well, so in the following I'm using "we" to encompass the very large cohort of my fellow believers and travelers.
We are not the enemy. We are, perennially, the targets of the ignorant, those who are disinclined (unlike you) to try to engage us in dialogue and get better acquainted with what we actually believe and think. Your phrasing in today's post is borderline, in my opinion. You don't use explicit references, per se, but the connotations of your phrasing are inescapable.
I never blame such things, never you personally, for the backlash we face. We've entered a time when open expressions of hostility are becoming the norm. Have you seen the reporting on "your body, our choice"? Do we have to wait for direct expressions of such things, like vandalism and physical attacks? What happened recently in Amsterdam makes many of us very, very nervous.
So far, it is sparse and isolated, but that won't last long with our ultra-fast dissemination of what people say via the Internet. Hell, someone is promoting "your body, our choice" t-shirts and sweatshirts, and Amazon among other outlets are selling them with advertising.
I hate to say it, but I can't avoid it: it will get ugly. In the meantime, should any woman in my sight or hearing is targeted with any of that, I've already decided that I will go right to 10 on the anger scale, and there will be bruises and broken bones at the very least. My sisters, daughters, nieces and granddaughter deserve no less.
Is that some meme about abortion? I don't get what the issue is. There is not a snowball's chance in Hell that there will be a federal abortion ban, and Trump has said repeatedly that he would veto any such bill even on the off-chance that it manages to make it to his desk. (And I believe him: it's pretty obvious that he has no interest whatsoever in that sort of political albatross.) And abortion rights have been approved in pretty much every state where the issue has been put to a popular vote, with the measure only failing in Florida because it only got 57% rather than the requisite 60% in that case.
In short, abortion rights don't seem to be remotely under threat, and they even seem to have been broadly strengthened after the repeal of Roe, with state after state approving such rights by outright democratic mandate. Sounds like what you're referring to just amounts to cruel trolls harassing women who are hysterical about a non-issue, which is to say that they're both caught in a mutual doom loop that has no point of contact with reality.
So far, the reports I've seen about the "your body, our choice" thing is from high schools and college campuses. I'm trying very hard to ascribe it to male immaturity and sexual insecurity, and if the source of it should turn out to be the abortion issue, I must still assume that it is more about sex and its "availability" than about a direct connection to the abortion rights issues.
My honest opinion is that it is an ugly resurgence of the male practice of cat calls and wolf whistles. Mix in the normalization of the involuntary celibate (Incel) phenomenon, and you get an idea of my point of view here.
That makes sense. I guess I'd also wonder, though, if the type of liberal woman whose first instinct when she gets upset is to film herself and post it on TikTok is kind of, you know, asking to be trolled. (Not asking to be sexually harassed—there's no such thing. But asking to be trolled is probably a thing.) It's possible that these men and these women deserve each other.
I'm more than a bit confused about your upset liberal woman reference. I have seen no evidence to support the notion, let alone to support your implied blanket inclusion of "type of liberal woman". I'll certainly read what you have to say about that.
My main social circle is stage performance artists. Some few of them participate in explicit (in language and verbal imagery) performances. I don't know any of them who decided to do so from any sort of spur-of-the-moment motivation.
You haven't seen any of the videos? There are oodles of videos of young liberal women completely freaking out and crying and screaming at the camera about the results of the election, including insane claims about how all their rights are gonna be taken away (abortion foremost among them). And yes, one does wonder, "These couldn't have all been first takes, could they? I wonder how many attempts were made at this performance. . . ."
So, I mean to say that there could be a really toxic dynamic going on of the woman acting crazy and then a male troll sort of egging her on. But the videos are so off-the-wall that it's hard to feel like the women are totally innocent if that's what's happening. And you're saying it's coming out of high schools and college campuses, that sounds like about the right age range for the posting such videos on TikTok.
I must admit that I would expect you to not draw a conclusion based on volume (appearances and sound!). However, there is a long standing phenomenon which entails women calling the trolling "slut shaming", and reacting to that. They often cite Bettie Page and Mae West (among other women) as inspirational, flaunting themselves without shame and ignoring the trolling of their times. I'm not sure that's a direct rebuttal for you, but it seemed important to mention.
I hear the crying and screaming among my friends (very much so on Facebook). I also see them coming back later and being self-honest about how unproductive such things usually are.
My son, who is not religious, is a student, and works part-time as a tour guide in Japan, looking at temples, palaces, etc.
He says that US liberals have something wrong with them. They ask weird questions about the Buddhist position on transgender rights and so on. He got talking to one Californian woman, and said that his fiancee has been to Texas a lot, and has relatives there, and that he and she have sometimes thought about living there. She replied with "Oh, no, that's terrible; you can't get an abortion there". Imagine saying that to someone who's talking about a family future?
The good news is abortion amendments failed in 3 states (and sadly, passed in seven). They were Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota. Failed with less that fifty percent support in Nebraska and South Dakota.
I thought "your body, our choice" on T-shirts was a faminist critique charactering pro-life positions. I googled it. It's not. NIck Fuentes appears to have said "Your bodoy, my choice. Forever" the day after the election and it is being copied. Men (presumably) are posting that on tiktok - things like "Your body, my choice, cutie" as a response to women who speaks pro-abortion.
edit to add: "Your body, our choice is not to see a separate human being killed" is what we mean - we have no control over the woman's actual body in the way Frentes intimates. Click bating racist misogynist grifter.
A lot of people take the rhetoric to refer to rape. If that’s what little piss ants like Nick Fuentes mean, they’d better watch it because red state guys have mothers, wives, sisters & daughters.
I’m too old to be harassed by these guys probably but if they tried saying that to me or to my daughters or granddaughter, it’d be “your balls, my foot.”
Is abortion the only right that you care about for the women in your life? How about the right to play a sport that they may have trained for since they were little girls only to be perennially defeated by a man whose ambition exceeds his abilities to compete with other men? Or to be permanently injured by same?
People can die from quite minor surgical procedures, oral surgery, podiatric surgery, etc either from anesthesia or sepsis. But the statistics for deaths during or after an abortion, which must occur, are never publicized. Every girl 16 and under having an abortion is the victim of statutory rape but no one asks whether the father is her teenaged boyfriend or a predator. Parents, husbands, boyfriends all force girls and women into choices they may deeply regret but no one is allowed to ask. Those shirts you describe are in bad taste but abortion will remain legal in most places as most Americans have decided it should. Is infanticide, or smothering or dismembering a full term baby really something worth fighting for?
The moral right for a woman to be sovereign in her body is a top-three motivation for the feminist movement. It covers marital rape (because men are in charge), the advent of the hysterectomy as a "treatment" for mental illness in women (see also the etymology of "hysterical"), and the original motivation for no-fault divorce, there being a very long time before that when no woman had the legal right to file for divorce.
Women's sports and transgender "invasion" of them is a red herring in this discussion. I absolutely believe in a level playing field in politics for women's sports, and allowing trans women to compete is demonstrably a violation of that level playing field.
Rape and statutory rape have a very tortured history. Two of my sisters were the victims of sexual assault, one of them twice, and after duly filing police reports no investigation happened. The entire thing is a strong remnant of my first point: men were sovereign, and women were their subjects. Consider this comparison: female sex workers are subject to criminal laws. Men are routinely slapped on the hand with sayings like "boys will be boys".
There are plenty of credible and some verified stories of men gathering in a circle around a rape in progress, and cheering it on or lining up to be next.
Every full-term fetus is evidence that the woman wants the baby. There are rare cases which prove this rule. The woman in Texas who died of sepsis along with her baby was denied treatment twice because they detected a fetal heartbeat, and the attending physicians were afraid of criminal prosecution. Never mind that they were wrong about that. A woman died for absolutely no medical reason.
If you witness infanticide, or smothering or dismembering, it falls on you to report it to the authorities. In the meantime, I have no interest in arguing with you about a point that has no objective evidence to support it. I will point out one fact that you can verify for yourself: no state in the Union legalizes late-term abortions for any reason other than a life-threatening condition. A woman died in Texas. What do you think about that?
I think it was a tragedy. I think it was medical malpractice. It is always unacceptable not to treat an emergency first and ask questions later whether those questions refer to insurance or law. But I do not believe it was publicized so it never happens again, a good outcome, but because it was politically expedient, a gift to a flailing campaign. Unfortunately for the dems Just Abortion, Okay? did not turn out to be the magic key to the White House.
Everyone has a plan until they've been punched in the face. Clearly you've never actually been punched in the face. Otherwise you'd be way more circumspect, even on the internet.
You'd also be more circumspect if you'd ever actually been in a situation where you were the one who punched somebody in the face. Interpersonal violence is a burden for the person who employs it that lingers, unless the person is a sociopath.
As for my sister, frankly, she could stand to be taken down a peg. She's a bit insufferable, to be perfectly honest. Thankfully she lives several hundred miles away and rarely comes around.
Personally, I’m glad to see religion/witchcraft/occult ideologies coming to the forefront, replacing atheism and agnosticism as the flavor of the moment for the unsaved.
This pushes them towards a “hot or cold” mentality, which will force them to think about these positions/ideas instead of choosing to be “lukewarm”. I think it’s usually a quicker road to Christ for the true seeker.
My oldest son is in that boat today, and atheism/agnosticism gave him a place to land and “not decide”. Witchcraft and the like, forces the issue.
Go ahead Barnes and Noble, set the choice before the public in this clearer fashion than “God is Dead”.
“But if it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the LORD, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served, which were beyond the Euphrates River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”
I don't know Rosie--the Occult gets its hooks in one, and a person may never come out. Agnostics/atheists are sort of on the fence. People who get into the Occult are dealing with demons, whether they know it or not, and demons do not give up a person without a fight.
My kids grew away from the faith (they're back now, but it's not perfect), and I nagged them back into the church. Not continually, just from time-to-time. That, and setting the example of going to mass, and having a husband that was doing the same.
If my kids had started drifting into the Occult during this period, it would have been war.
And what if my kids went gay. War. I know, but as I've warned the kids "I'm a really bad candidate to be a parent of a gay kid."
Does that make me intolerant? Afterall, it's not all about me. That's right, it's about them, and I'm not having it because I have to answer to God: what did you do when you saw your kid turning gay? I treat gay people the way I treat all people (attempt to be polite and respectful, wishing all well), but not my kids, they're not getting my kids. Other than that, I've given the gay thing to God. It's not just one thing happening in the gay community--some are born that way (it seems some men are just born effeminate, just as some women are born mascultine (gay or not), but a lot of it is trauma and parental abandonment and/or abuse of one type or other.
I don't believe in transgendering anyone--meaning, I don't buy into the need for blockers and surgery for 99.999999% of what is going on in that department. I know, there are very rare cases of ambiguous sex. I'll leave that to the medical experts and ethicists to figure out. But the broad promotion of "gender theory" is flat out demonic in my book. What it attempts to do is to interpose the government between the parent and child. Unfortunately, there are some transhuesen-by-proxy wacko MOTHERS out there who trans their kids--these people are sickening to me. I don't want any surgeries/puberty blockers except in the rarest of rare cases of sexual ambiguity because of genetic abnormalities.
I agree, Theodore, and the only way to get it out of the curriculum is to break up the DOE and get teacher ed out of the hands of the teachers' unions. I'm for school vouchers. The schools would have to be certified, so right there, caution, because when the Teachers' Unions are locked out of the front door, they'll try to get back in through the back door of "school certification" once we go to vouchers. I hope we do go to vouchers. It would be the first step toward vanquishing "woke" from the curriculum.
You are very smart lady. It's always important to think three steps ahead, because they do. But everything I see coming out Mar a Lago is that Trump is dead serious on delivering.
Thank you Anne, for your thoughtful reply, and your personal experience - it is always encouraging to hear of another mother who has seen a child return to Christ!
I agree with you that the Atheist is “on the fence”, and also that demons don’t give up without a fight. The truth is, the one “on the fence” is also in the clutches of the demonic, but it’s a different look. It’s a different fight. And I think it’s more deceptive.
Consider Rev 3:15-17a :
“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot. 16So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of My mouth. 17Because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have no need of anything,” and you do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked,”
Swimming in lukewarm ideologies give a false sense of security, because the person is lulled into believing nothing is happening “beneath the surface”. These people are in a “stupor”, unaware of the danger, that they are still on the road to hell.
This is in contrast to actively participating and pursuing the demonic. Those people are primed, if you will, to recognize the Truth.
CS Lewis does a wonderful job delving into this topic in the entertaining and though-provoking book, “The Screwtape Letters”.
But I also know that God knows how to reach the “lost lambs” and I trust Him. I rejoice with you with the return of your children, and I’m grateful you followed His leading to be persistent with inviting them back to church. Sounds like the Lord really used it!💗
I am a huge fan of CS Lewis. I have read almost all of his nonfiction (outside of his academic books on Middle Age Literature) and some of his fiction. Matter of fact, Lewis won me over in my mid-twenties, along with encountering a few Christians who led me back (they were both Prot, but they got me back in the RCC! Ha! ) Lewis has converted tens of millions of people. He is like a Prot saint in my book.
Michael Heiser has an interesting YouTube video about the real meaning of that scriptural passage (hot or cold vs lukewarm) - it's very insightful, with a different theological take than what I, at least, always heard in church.
You're right about the challenges, Rod. Aaron Renn says that Trump could get elected only because we're in the "negative world" (negative about Christianity)
Rod, your theme song should be "Get Around" by the Beach Boys. "Get around, get around, I get around, I get around wheeeee ooooh." I hope you get to whisk through security (my hubby used to have some "world traveller" classification that whistked him through security when he was flying all over the globe all of the time. (He enjoys travel. Me, not so much. ) I think it costs money to get preapproved as a "world traveller" (of course) who thereafter one doesn't have to strip down to board a plane. Also, I hope you're wracking up frequent flier miles and credit card points.
I am optimistic about Trump's second chance. I hope the House isn't getting stolen--I am reading here and there the House races are still indeterminate. Gulp. Because if the Dems somehow steal the House, they could use the budget to ring out "concessions" and stop a lot of Trump's agenda like removing the illegals, starting with the criminals and gang members. The GOP COULD have done this with Biden (hold up funding to force compromise), but the GOP tends to be the stupid party. The House (if stolen) could refuse to certify the election. So, while we're all feeling relief, prayers and fasting must continue to protect Trump and so that we are to make the reforms to preserve the country.
Rep. Jamie Raskin is salivating to somehow refuse to certify the election. We must continue to pray. The Dems are getting desperate. And Marc Elias is a master mind of election theft.
I think it's important to make a distinction between the institutional Dems and the media. The first are far to savvy not to see what has happened, unless they're real morons like Schiff.
Not that much in politics actually ticks me off, because our government has become a uniparty and even the pols who want to be honest are completely thwarted by having to prostitute themselves to even try to get something good done. I did not used to be this cynical, but there you go - history of the last few decades. But I was completely incensed when I heard that Schiff's campaign funneled a whole lot of money into support of Steve Garvey in the primary in California, in order to force Katie Porter out (because of the stupid "top two" rule that my fellow citizens voted for as one of many crazy initiatives it is so easy to get on the ballot here) - forcing out one of his own party to assure himself a win in the general election (Garvey was a non-starter and everyone knew it). I was still mad about that dastardly underhanded, unethical and mercenary move by Schiff, and I wrote in Katie Porter on Tuesday just for spite.
Not so, Charlie, he says he will make sure Trump isn't certified by claiming he is an insurrectionist based on Jan 6. (Jan 6 was organized by the Feds-- who is Ray Epps? Pelosi was in on the plan.) It will not fly perhaps unless the Left manages to steal the House.
I can't think who is more delusional, Jamie Raskin thinking he's going to pull off such arrant nonsense, or you thinking he is seriously going to try. Whatever, its not going to happen. January 6 was organized by a Fed ... he occupied the office of President of the United States. Of course its not going to fly.
This morning I saw in the local paper that a few national Dems are talking about "the election was stolen, there's been fraud, twenty million votes don't just disappear like that." They're wrong of course, indulging in the same sore loser sour grapes stuff the Trump camp did in 2020. It actually discredits both claims, they are so similar, so speculative, so ill-founded, and to those who know the election process, so impossible. Votes don't disappear, but voters become disenchanted to drop out in large numbers.
So the Democrats are trying to steal the House but somehow they neglected to steal the Senate & the White House? That doesn’t make any sense. People don’t like Congress in general but they like or at least tolerate, their own Congress critter. Anyone who’s ever worked the polls knows that every ballot, in person or mail in, has to match a name on the voter rolls. Poll watchers are a mix of R, D, and Independent. Just take the win. Voter fraud happens but not on a large scale. Even Republicans knew this in 2020. Except for some sore headed Dem conspiracy weirdos, Democrats know this in 2024. Saying it’s cheating only when your side loses is childish no matter which side does it.
I haven’t been to work in several days because of the bucketloads of snow in Colorado, but when I do get back, I’m going to really enjoy fellow teachers being upset about the possibility of the impending doom of the Department of Education.
What? And have Randi Weingarten lose her job (given that she's the de facto head of DoE)?
Seriously, it would be awesome if that department were wiped from the face of the earth and power returned to the states & localities
Rod, gay is trans is gay is trans. Trans came out of gay. Among those arrested at stonewall were trannies. The trans indoctrination in schools is exactly the same as the gay indoctrination in schools. In schools, they are teaching anal sex and encouraging the use of PReP, a gay party drug that inhibits HIV. it’s all the same sexual revolution.
Logically, however, the two things are totally incompatible with each other. Transgender ideology doesn't believe in the existence of sexed bodies—which is to say that it negates the very basis of gay and lesbian identity, since same-sex attraction presumes that male and female are immutable realities. (If a gay man decided he's trans and so became a woman who's attracted to men, then would he be merely . . . straight? It makes one's head hurt.) I've been waiting awhile for that powder keg of a contradiction to finally explode; the absurdity of the alliance is right up there with the wokists imagining the Muslims to be their friends.
Until you understand that the relationship in homosexual couplings includes bottoms and tops, meaning one of the men takes the role of a woman. Swishy gay men have always assumed the female role. Transsexualism is merely an exaggeration of what’s been present all along. “Hips of lips, Dorothy,” says Al Pacino to a stranger in the movie Cruising.
There are two types of trans; gay men who want to attract straight men, and straight men who get a sexual thrill to be sexually desired by men.
“Hips or lips, Dorothy.
Can't both of these thing be true simultaneously? The gay/trans "alliance" is fundamentally incoherent AND both are fruit of the SexRev and therefore related?
I believe that the SexRev itself has many foundational contradictions of this sort. Why one materialized on this particular issue is simply a manifestation of more basic incoherencies.
I agree. It's contradictory in some ways, as Sethu points out. At the same time, though, it's "consistent" in other ways -- gays and trans both are behaving in ways that were historically considered as inappropriate (or worse) for people of their sex -- either by means of whom they wanted to have sex with, or whom they wanted to present as. That's the link -- behaving in ways that until very recently were verboten for members of the male or female sex.
It's why it's always been clear to me that gay rights would lead to trans rights, because the same logic applies -- the same logic of liberated to do with your body what you want, whether that involves whom you're shagging or how you're presenting. Just because "normie" gays like Andrew Sullivan "never saw it coming" (which I frankly don't believe, anyway, he's too smart for that to be true) doesn't mean everyone else, including the trans movement, didn't see it coming.
I guess that makes a sort of sense, if you focus on just the pure reality of transgression. My thought process was that the gays are making an empirical statement about their desires, whereas the transgenders are making a metaphysical statement about the nature of identity, which seems like a totally different sort of claim. But sure, you're right that they have the common denominator of doing unholy things with one's body, if that's the point.
I agree that, on the level of tactical argument, there is a clear contradiction.
From my perspective, though, those arguments were always tactical -- a means to an end. Born that way is a persuasive argument to many people because of the civil rights history in the US in terms of legal and cultural precedent. Trans didn't have an easy tactical argument like that, so it had to rely on the coat-tails of the gay movement's momentum after Obergefell, mostly, coupled with an argument about identity was wasn't even created at the time of Stonewall and, yes, it's a crazy-pants argument. And, as you say, the "ask" is different as well.
From my perspective, the goal, though, has always been to delegitimize restrictions on what people of a certain sex do around the intersection of sex and gender, both in terms of whom they shag, and how they look. Those are indeed different things, and because of that different tactical arguments were deployed, but they're always going to be naturally linked. It's why the Ts were in the LGBT umbrella to begin with.
Re: I guess that makes a sort of sense, if you focus on just the pure reality of transgression.
OK, but if you go back far enough in history that can apply to quite a few other groups: Protestants were transgressive in Catholic nations, Catholics in Protestant nations and Jews everywhere. Oh, and quite a few people paid for their lives under that regime. women were told it was "unnatural" for them to be concerned with politics. Slaves were told their "natural" place was to be submissive bondsmen.
Both of them are attacks on God's created order.
The great majority of people discussing these things back after Obergefell believed that a move toward pedophilia or polyamory would likely be next. Very few, if any, guessed the trans thing, and this includes people who were very active in the debate. In that sense I believe Sullivan is telling the truth. I'm sure he knew that *something* would come next, but I don't think he presumed it would be trans.
I was really expecting the big drive to be to start depriving churches that "discriminated" against gay marriage of their tax-exept status. I think that would have come if the transgender thing hadn't sucked all the air of of the room.
Yes. I know that's what people say, and it makes some small degree of sense, but the movement was LGBT. T was going to be addressed very soon once LG were dealt with (B just merges into either G,L or straight). The lobbyists are lobbyists for LGBT.
I don't honestly think that someone like Sullivan could have been surprised that T was coming next for that reason.
I definitely DO think, however, that people like Sullivan (and many other Ls and Gs in the movement) were not aware of how radical gender ideology had become, and that this aspect of the trans advocacy both surprised and shocked them.
I'm hoping polyamory, polygamy and pedophilia is next on the left's moral horizon. If two men or two women can marry, why not one man and three women?
The contradictions are always the starting point when trying to blow something up -- in the sense of taking it apart I mean, not raising it up.
The notion that there are merely normal gays is a part of the white picket fence myth that was first propagated in the gay marriage debates. It is an unhappy, largely friendless predatory environment.
Please see my comment above. The messenger here is Joe Sciambra. Everybody else ought to shut up.
Love Joe.
I can't find any comment of yours on this thread referencing Joe Sciambra.
I didn’t reference Sciambra. All I was trying to say is that he speaks with moral authority. Everybody else sounds like a scold.
Who?
I'm sorry, but this is just absurd if you know any number of gay people in real life. The ones I know, through friendship and family just want to be left alone to lead happy lives and aren't interested in converting the planet to deviant-world. You seem to be pretty locked into your position, though.
Gay people do not simply want be left alone, they love to talk about the fact that they’re gay. As for myself, I’ve never met a heterosexual.
Societies who reward degenerate behavior deserve to die.
Its perfectly true of many gay couples -- but that doesn't serve the interests of think tanks trying to justify their next grant proposal. They need something more spectacular.
Yeah “trans women” are big mad that lesbians don’t want to have sex with them & their “girl dicks”. Accusing the lesbians of transphobia. No, they’re not into men & you’re still a man, Sparky.
I read an article, (I'll try and dig it up if I can if I have time, but that's a big if unfortunately) where there's also a lot of pressure by female to male appearing transgenders pressuring gay men on sex. Testosterone is hell of a drug too.
Taking opposite sex hormones has a huge impact on the brain - it makes people aggressive, hypersexual and highly emotional. That is the scary thing for women about having “trans women” in their locker rooms. They have been known to physically threaten women who protest, and when they strike out they can do a lot of damage to a woman.
With some regret, I admit that I voted in support of legalizing gay marriage in my state before Obergefell. This was primarily because about 30 years ago in my old neighborhood, I knew a Log Cabin Republican who said, "A lot of people are opposed to gay relationships because they think we (gay people) are afraid of commitment. Some of us actually want committed relationships." This made sense to me, and hypothetically I have no problem with "civil unions" for gay relationships, although I don't think Christian churches should perform gay weddings. However, had I known that legalizing gay marriage would lead to the massive coercive-persusasion experiment known as transgenderism, especially the targeting of children and adolescents, I NEVER would have voted in support of it.
I have a few gay relatives (two by blood, one by my own traditional marriage), at least one gay work colleague (that I know of), and several gay acquaintances from a performance activity: it's very difficult to have any involvement in performance activities (such as theatre and dance) without interacting with gay people. While I don't have any major issues with any of the gay people in my life, sometimes I want to tell them, "If you're gay and living openly as such, why do you want 'gay' to be a primary factor of your identify? When I meet anyone for the first time, the last thng I want to think about is how they prefer to have sex. Having "gayness" as a primary identify is a form of self-inflicted dehumanization.
Some of Rod's subscribers may be interested in the work of G. Douglas Murray, a British writer who is politically conservative and gay.
In his book about mobs, Murray actually said that gay men have the secret that straight men have always wanted to know, which is what it’s like to be penetrated. It’s a pretty disgusting passage. And a guy like him is certainly not going to save Western civilization. He may be good on a whole lot of things, but on a proper understanding of human sexuality, he is dead wrong.
Murray pretends to be conservative but is truly homosexual and a liberal. There is nothing "gay" about sodomizing another man.
There are subdivisions where a contractor named a street after his daughter, who was named "Gay." I once worked with a man who was supposed to meet a woman named Gay at a campus library, but hadn't met her in person. He kept asking women walking by, "Are you Gay?"
My state had a Defense of Marriage Amendment on the ballot in 2006. I voted no. I saw no reason to constitutionally tie the hands of the legislature if at some future time a majority of citizens were disposed to accept some sort of civil union or even civil marriage license for same sex couples. I also had no sense that our state supreme court was likely to follow the shallow, sloppy, reasoning of the supreme court of Massachusetts and imposing a constitutional duty to license, regulate, and tax same-sex couples or call it a marriage. I recall a passenger on the paratransit bus I drove at the time who, on her way to Bible study at a WELS Lutheran church, said she was voting no on the grounds that "If God said it, we don't get to vote on it. So why are we voting on it?"
It seems to me that gays want us to tolerate or approve a behaviour, whereas trans want us to pretend to believe objective falsehoods.
I think for most people it's a matter of knowing perfectly well that the emperor wears no clothes , but not really knowing how to get out of the situation.
Exactly. The lobbyists and self-appointed advocacy organizations need something to justify their continued existence and funding, but the facts on the ground do not equate the two conditions. Its easy to accept that a same-sex couple next door keeps a nice garden and say hello in the morning. Its much harder to justify paying thousands of dollars at public expense so that someone with a half dozen cognitive and emotional disorders can get a rough approximation of the body they think they always wanted.
While all this may be true (except the Stonewall business, non-trans gays get very upset when claims are made for "trans" in that incident, and anyway cross-dressing is not trans, if that's what they're talking about), what good does it do to say it? Obergefell is the law of the land. SSM is widely popular with the general pop. You have to play the hand you're dealt. That something is true doesn't mean it's wise to say it. That's called the principle of economy, cf. John Henry Newman.
In games of cards, there are always new hands that are dealt. Things change. One thing that did change is the gaze went too hard on trans. And now they’re suffering the backlash which is a good thing. One thing that we cannot cave in on is the proposition that homosexuality is normal. It is clearly not.
But what does "cave" mean? Hammer it home? Put yourself in the position of being accused of obsession with the subject? Again, as soon as something becomes political caution is advised.
Never accept the normality proposition. It is against nature and against nature’s God.
I'm not getting anywhere with you, am I ?
Something "against" nature cannot exist at all. One might as well talk about an even-odd number.
Which is why they cannot reproduce.
The "gaze went too hard on trans" because little children were having their lives ruined and their bodies mutilated and their minds corrupted.
The gay gene does not exist. Most people who end up in this lifestyle come to it through sexual abuse or psychological issues related to their mother or father. If you look at gay literature, both fiction and nonfiction, as Mary Eberstadt about a decade ago, you find that most gays had their first experience as boys with older men. Their lives become no less ruined than those who were lead down the trans path.
True, but not really the point. That gays drew a line in the sand w/r/t trans doesn't mean that everything on the "gay" side of that line is therefore valid, only that the line is.
We do not need Andrew Sullivan at all to defeat the butchering of children. Accepting an alliance with Andrew Sullivan at Al, in the end, harms the larger fight with regard to the sexual revolution. Aligning yourself with Andrew Sullivan comes at a huge cost.
Show us your credentials. Are you a geneticist? Do you have degrees in psychology and/or psychiatry? Have you participated in studies and direct research?
I assure you, if your "knowledge" comes from surfing the Webs and sermons from the pulpit, you have no basis to assert anything about homosexuality.
I have worked in the literature for a few decades.
I would say that nobody of any persuasion has any basis to assert anything about homosexuality as scientifically established. Nobody and nothing. The minimum I would expect is a 50-year large-scale longitudinal study (maybe two or three distinct studies with separate populations of respondents) conducted by staff who had absolutely no bias, nothing to prove, no expectations, willing to simply follow the evidence and results wherever that leads. As of now, we have papers published by people who all have an ax to grind, who look at similar data and, lo and behold, loudly proclaim their hypothesis as their conclusion.
What I think is a sound basis to call for that as a prerequisite to proclaiming scientific conclusions is a diverse array of anecdotal evidence. Anecdotes are not statistically reliable to make generalized statements, but they are evidence of disparate outcomes and causes, which necessitates a great deal of rigorous study to settle anything.
There are people who say 'I knew since I was very young that I was gay' -- years before puberty. (Its true that heteronormative children have some male and female emotions toward each other, even without knowing the details of marital or non-martial union). There are those who "come out" and are told by their cousins, "we've known that for years." Then there are those who have detailed accounts of becoming same-sex attracted by traumatic experience, including but not limited to homosexual rape in their mid-teens. We don't have proof there is or is not a gay gene, nor do we have much study of epigenetic effects, nor the range of traumatic causes. Accordingly, I'm not willing to support any strident ideological proclamations. I am in favor of the American tradition of letting people live their lives as they choose, so long as it isn't inflicted on the rest of us. That doesn't mean back in the closet. It does mean, tone it down, nobody really cares, just live your life.
Given that the entire scientific community very publicly failed to distinguish the difference between a woman and a man in drag, I'm no longer willing to accept their word on anything at face value, least of all on social issues. Show me an actionable, reproducible result the way an engineer would or your 'science' is about as good as toilet paper.
No to get into with you two...I would simply caution the appeal to authority you're making about credentialing. While Google makes no man an expert; academic credentialing has often only knighted fools.
Of course not. Its basic biology that the human species, like all species more complex than a sponge, is heteronormative. If sexual dimorphism wasn't a spectacularly successful reproduction strategy, we wouldn't come in two sexes in the first place. All variations from the norm are merely that. But, variations from the norm are almost inevitable, biochemically speaking. The molecules twist a little, things aren't always perfect. whether that is a baby boy with five penises, a physically intersex baby with at least vestigial organs of both sexes, same-sex attraction, or whatever. What we need to get straight is that none of this is A Matter Of Great Social and Political Importance.
(TM).
I forgot to mention "borrowing a phrase from Janis Joplin"...
They have found no gay gene.
I know of no evidence anyone has found a gay gene or a genetic or epigenetic influence or cause for same-sex attraction. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I consider the question wide open, and unresolved. Therefore I am not content to accept public policies based on the assumption that there is some reliable scientific consensus on the matter, one way or the other.
Homosexual desire may be so strong as to seem inborn and unchangeable. .
That is one of many possibilities, but hardly established as THE way things happen. Which is why I want 50 years of rigorous longitudinal study before I accept anything as scientifically established.
Some years ago, someone posted in one of Rod's columns a personal experience of being homosexually raped in a library by an older man, at an age where he was confused about what it all meant, but capable of feeling sexual response in his own system. He went through a period of mixed shame and desire, but had eventually lived his life as a gay man. That's one example why I don't accept "Its genetic" or "Its inborn" as an established truth. There are other cases. I was doing biographical research for a reference work, and a playwright I was writing about turned out to have gone to a summer camp where older campers routinely sodomized younger ones as a rite of initiation. Apparently a lot of young men who had been through that camp stabilized as married heterosexuals, but at least one recalled "Afterward I was attracted to men and that was that." The individual I was writing about sought to marry a woman three times, but it never worked out. One began to suspect he was gay, another was certain that while his affection for her was sincere, a man they both knew was his real love and "I couldn't compete with that." He was chronically alcoholic most of his life. I suspect that those who tearfully testify that they are relieved to have overcome same-sex attraction and returned to heterosexual living are the ones who suffered traumatic experience, while those who claim to have always been gay -- who knows? A gene certainly hasn't been identified. Then there are cases like Rosaria Butterfield. I also once ran across an account of a conventional middle aged man who felt a good deal of same sex attraction, considered it an unwanted thorn in the flesh, and sought some form of conversion therapy because he didn't want to feel that way. I presume it was a non-violent form of voluntary therapy -- the term has been applied to all kinds of methods and systems.
Re: That's one example why I don't accept "Its genetic" or "Its inborn" as an established truth.
Strictly speaking it's a reason not to accept the inborn theory as 100% applicable to everyone. But outside the basics of physics very few theories are anything but statistical generalities admitting of exceptions.
I think that Americans are basically a live-and-let-live people, and that the transgender cult made a critical error when they thought they could get away with not merely asking for the right to live as they wish, but also making irrational and onerous demands on everyone else. So if you're saying it's prudent to strengthen the wedge against them instead of lumping them together with a popular cause that's already been lost, then yes, I agree.
Do you think that grade school children should be taught about homosexuality in certain homosexual acts?
I don't think you're grasping the gist of my comment, or of what Ted is suggesting.
You say we are live and let live nation. Most people have no idea about the notion of homosexuality that are being fed to grade school children. Did I get the gist?
No, I don't believe you have.
An obvious consensus can be built that sharing sexually explicit material of any kind with children is out of bounds. The point is that given the popular winds, hitching the transgender wagon to the homosexual wagon would not have a desirable effect from our standpoint. Rather, it would be wiser to treat them as separate things than one thing, because treating them as one thing would make the transgender cult seem more sympathetic to much of the public.
Remember that gay marriage lost in 34 statewide races prior to it being imposed by the federal courts and the Supreme Court.
No one is arguing that SSM was a backstairs job. I lived in Massachusetts when it was railroaded there, by one vote on the Supreme Judicial Court. But once it became the law of the land it became popular. This is the case. We have to live with it.
I don’t think it’s popular at all. In fact, gays are avoiding it in droves.
I mean the idea of it. With the general pop.
I think the people are resigned to it. But I still think no one actually thinks that two men are married, or hardly anyone. And the idea of what they do intimately is repellent to almost everyone. To normal young people, it is laughed at and mocked.
It remains a day of profound sadness when a man hears his son say that he wants to be mounted by another man.
Of course it is. Read Anne Heath in these boxes on her attitude towards her own children and these practices. But that's a private matter. If we want to defeat these people we have to be more circumspect publicly.
No. We must fly the flag. They want us to think that we are alone, and that we are the only ones who believe this. Flying the flag, being public about it let people understand that we can still condemned this behavior in this movement.
Norm MacDonald?
Miss him
The Goodridge decision was some of the sloppiest judicial reasoning in the history of the Republic. They failed to define their terms before beginning their reasoning, and then emerged from their reasoning by redefining fundamental terms. You can't meaningfully debate access to marriage without defining what marriage IS. No law up to that point denied homosexuals the right to marry. Laws simply didn't recognize two persons of the same sex AS constituting a marriage.
I lived in Maryland-- where in 2012 SSM was voted in by public referendum ,and by a surprisingly large margin.
It lost unpopular vote in 34 states.
And We The People can change our minds. There was a time when women voting or interracial marriage seemed outlandish. No result in politics is every securely permanent.
The SJC ruled on Goodridge in 2004.
Yes, but times were a-changing by the 2010s.
I long for the days when trans referred to isomers in chemistry and gay meant happy.
Your comment makes me gay
I think an important perspective to keep in mind in the aftermath of the recent US election is that incumbent parties have been losing across the globe this year. And the Democrats didn't lose as badly as many other incumbent parties. So I am cautious of reading this election as a mandate for dramatic change, even as much as I don't think the Dems particularly deserved to win in 2024 based on their positioning and governing record. (I lean idiosyncratically left but identify a lot with the analysis being offered up by Frank that's excerpted above, for example)
Re: I think an important perspective to keep in mind in the aftermath of the recent US election is that incumbent parties have been losing across the globe this year.
Yep. It's a "Throw the bums out" era. The only bum to survive has been Macron in France, and only by making an alliance of convenience with a faction otherwise quite opposed to his party.
I just saw James Carville's youtube podcast, and after excoriating Democrats for going woke, he advised them to relentlessly call out every time Republicans do something to make working class voters' lives materially worse and run on "they betrayed you" in 2026.
I saw Republicans are planning to remove 10 million people from Obamacare next year. There are a lot of white working class voters who will be hurt by that. I would advise them to back off that unless they have a materially better replacement ready.
I very much doubt anybody is going to monkey with ACA. Pelosi's staff designed it for the approval of the insurance lobby.
And big medicine.
The last time Trump tried to end the ACA, Republican congress critters were deluged by people in district meetings telling them "We would be dead or bankrupt if not for the ACA." Not that it made much difference in their votes. Repeal failed by John McCain.
More than a couple GOP governors would not want the ACA gone either as they would lose oodles of federal money which is keeping their healthcare system up and running-- and might not be able to replace it leading to disastrous consequences. Louisiana healthcare almost went bust (Rod was alarmed by the possibility of mass hospital shut downs at the time) before John Bel Edwards was elected and embraced ACA Medicaid.
They are not yet proposing to abolish Obamacare (yet) but the subsidies for premiums are set to expire and they will just let that happen, making insurance unaffordable for about 10 million people
I work 50+ hours a week with employer-sponsored healthcare, and it's unaffordable for me because of ACA. After the implementation of ACA, my insurance premiums tripled in less than four years, and the coverage decreased dramatically.
I also have an employer sponsored plan and that has not happened, but I agree entire U.S. Healthcare system is messed up. If he is smart Trump will propose to replace with something like the Israeli, Hungarian or Australian systems
Can you expand on this? IMO, major surgery on healthcare is probably ill-advised at this time. Every administration that has attempted it has suffered major electoral losses. IMO, the most important feature of the ACA, after eliminating the "pre-existing condition" crap, has been the Medicaid expansion, and some way needs to be found to get the remaining refusenik states (looking at DeSantis' Florida) on board.
Biden did expand the subsidies, which were rather stingy, quite a ways up the income scale, pegging eligibility to the affordability of the average plan offered at 9.02% of one's income. And the ACA guarantees that plans come with protections against certain former industry outrages Before the ACA there were a lot of "cheap" plans which were little better than scams as they would use fine print pettifoggery to deny payment of claims or even cancel policies the moment a claim was made.
True. Obamacare, however imperfect, has been about his only good policy. And Medicaid cuts would not be wise. I have no statistics but I'd guess that nearly half of Trumpite West Virginia relies on Medicaid.
Probably like 70%. I don’t live in WV but living in Rockingham County I am WV adjacent & lots of people from Hardy & Pendleton Counties come over the mountain everyday to work in & around Harrisonburg. Also a lot of red state voters depend on Social Security & Medicare.
I am on Social Security now. And I'll be on Medicare in eight months. I do think Medicare payments from workers and employers should be slowly raised to pay for the program and keep it fiscally sound.
Yes I agree but we also need to remove the income cap on SS taxation. It’s regressive taxation for somebody who makes $30K a year to have their entire income subject to SS tax while somebody who earns $250K a year pays no SS tax on the portion of their income over $168,600.
Martha, I support not only raising the cap on Social Security taxes but eliminating it. Why not have a progressive tax rate for Social Security and extend it to the millions made by LeBron James, Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Jeff Bezos, J.B. Pritzker, Bill Gates, the Bush family, the Walton family, the Kennedy family and especially Javy Baez, the $25 million a year shortstop who hit .185.
Let's hit Pritzker twice.
Well, I got hit with the Medicare Surtax after reaching my SS income limit. The Surtax is greater than the SS
You might also add making taxes for Social Security apply to all income, not just earned income. Doing that will reduce the percentage that all pay and make paying it less onerous for the lower income types.
I don’t want to be taxed extra because older people want to live the good life while never actually voting to fully fund the program or have enough kids to do so. I say make you old people work longer
For many, Thomas, it's not a question of living the good life, it's a question of living at all.
I’m on SS & have a modest pension, my husband has SS & and a 401(k). I can assure you we are not living high on the hog.
By live the good life I meant during the working years. You want these benefits but you never wanted to pay enough to keep them solvent. Now, of course, since the boomers are retiring and the benefits are busted fiscally it is time to raise taxes on everyone else. Typical boomer move
I've said this before: many older people could work longer, but there's a huge problem with employers not wanting to hire them (while also moaning and groaning about feckless young employees). This past weekend in Fort Lauderdale I had a visit with a woman I had not seen in nearly forty years; I worked with her in in my late teens. She's fifteen years older than me (hence 72). She doesn't have much savings as she's worked in restaurants and the like all her life, and she frightened of losing her current job at the casino (where she brags she can run rings around the younger servers). She had a hard time finding that job, and she forebodes that of had to job hunt again her age would rule her out.
As for tax increases, we're not talking above about raising the FICA tax rate, but about applying that tax to the whole of high income people's salaries.
The question is whether Trump understands that. He as much as Kamala Harris lives in a dream world of his own imagination, where people are what he imagines, not what getting acquainted with daily life would tell anyone paying attention.
Awfully interesting that his imagination of the American people coordinated perfectly with their policy wishes. Might it be that a guy who has built a lot of stuff has gotten to know quite a few blue collar workers?
Henry Ford paid his workers well because he knew they needed the money to be able to buy one of the autos they'd helped to assemble.
There is nothing about any of the last three elections that tells us anything about the policy wishes of the American people. Nothing. These have been elections between manifestly unqualified candidates. Trump won in 2016 because he was running against Hillary Clinton. His margin if victory in key states, particularly Wisconsin where it was well documented, was provided by voters who twice supported Barack Obama, then Bernie Sanders. Biden managed to squeak through in 2020 because people had gotten a look at how Trump actually performed -- despite Biden having never gotten out of single digits in a primary any time before. Trump had fewer votes in 2024 than in 2020 -- but Kamala Harris had 13 million fewer than Biden. Either of the so-called, self-styled, extra-constitutional "Two Major Parties" that bucked the trend and ran a competent candidate with a substantive program would have crushed the other in a landslide. Any candidate who couldn't win a landslide against the other in any of these elections was showing how unsuitable they really are.
Henry Ford was a self-infatuated brutal thug who didn't invent much of anything (thousands of people were developing automotive technology), but did have one bright idea: mass production on an assembly line. (Ask any of the UAW organizers about Henry Ford's deep connection to the working class).
After listening to Kamala's incoherent New Age musings for the last several weeks, I'd say that her head is firmly in the clouds, not Trump's.
Harry Bennett was Ford's connection to the working man.
I'm not a Ford apologist, for several reasons. He wasn't the best example to cite and I probably didn't need one, anyway. If someone is a builder, he necessarily is going to be spending a lot of time with blue collar workers.
More notably, when Ford increased wages for his workers other employers had to follow suit-- or they would lose workers to the labor-intensive auto industry. That meant a lot of working people could afford Ford's cars.
But somehow the United Auto Workers still had to strike Ford to get a really good wage, and Ford fought them with hired thugs to keep more money for himself.
170 Republican house members signed onto a budget in March that would cut Medicaid by 25%, repeal ability of Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices, and allow insurance companies to hike premiums for people with pre-existing conditions. Real populist stuff.
When I was 25 and more ideological, I would have been one of the 170 had I been elected to Congress. Maturing, marrying, running a business and having children has tempered my ideological assumptions and prejudices. I'd say no to Medicaid cuts and Medicare cuts. I would support a higher tax- dare I wrote it- for Medicare from workers and employers. Having been my company's comptroller, we are not contributing enough to Medicare especially as modern medicine allows people to live much longer.
That's you. That's not the Republicans in congress. I've had reason since 2010 to say that Democrats deserved to lose elections, but what Republicans do when they get into office is too high a price to pay. But, perhaps God in his infinite wisdom has decided we need to go through this ugliness in order to really expunge the Democratic rot, and then we can deal with the Republican dysfunction. I had looked for it to happen the other way, but they both need to go.
If they do that, they’ll get wiped out in the 2026 midterms.
Top Trump advisor Scott Bessant (ex-Soros fund executive) just wrote an op-ed in Wall Street Journal calling to get rid of policy of encouraging semiconductor manufacturing in U.S. and "let the market allocate capital" (which means continued reliance on Taiwan to make our computer chips). Also called for "strong dollar" policy that makes it impossible for our goods to compete overseas.
When Biden funneled billions into Intel, ostensibly to make chips, Intel execs flipped him the bird and spent it all on stock buybacks. The rot goes VERY deep. I don't agree with refusing to protect domestic corporations, but when they act like this, policy proposals like the one you mention are obviously going to start popping up.
Stock buy backs should be illegal as they were before 1982
Similarly, although the Affordable Care Act made some very beneficial changes for millions of Americans, it failed to deliver on cheaper health insurance premiums for all. That's because, relieved of the burden of "uncompensated care" which had been the rationale for high medical service charges, the corporations that run most health care delivery declined to lower their charges (which would have allowed for lower insurance premiums), and instead kept themselves awash in cash and went on a spree with mergers and acquisitions. Any measure handing out public money needs to be tightly controlled to insure maximum benefit to the ultimate end user and funder.
If we're going to decouple from China we cannot be dependent of Taiwan.
This is one empiric of just how discombobulated and inconsistent the Trump administration is going to be. Trump never said anything precise or programmatic on the campaign trail, he was a raucous cheerleader and promised the moon. No matter who he surrounds himself with, the first criterion is going to be personal loyalty, and what policies each of them tries to push will be secondary. Its going to be a hundred horses pulling in a hundred directions.
The greater point of Rod's essay is that the Left, and the Dems won't give up. Their ideology is about control, using government power--even illegally--to achieve their "goals". Witness that the creep Mark Elias and his work in the PA senate race.
Short term celebration if one is a believer in populism and restoration of Constitutional norms, but we need to be on guard and ready to continue the fight, b/c the radical Left sure isn't going to stop.
Righties miss big picture as they cheer victory. Blue , red is misnomer. Should be red big gov’t vs blue big gov’t. Both sides cheer big gov’t for the win. Recipe for decline as big gov’t crowds out private virtue. Look at $35T debt. More folks choose servitude to gov’t & will work more waking hours for the man. Politicians including red trumpistas love it. Why? Gives “elite” more power including red elite , red politicians, red power brokers. Recall Trump was part of elite club & still is. Difference is this time elite wear red. Although far less influential than blue elite many red elite just riding maga coattails for the con. Well I handed over the envelope anyway & kissed the padrino’s ring. Protection money.
I think this is wrongheaded but I can set you straight on red/blue. I happened to be watching TV the night it was invented, Election Night 2000. Its inventor was the late Tim Russert, who came up with the color coding on a handheld whiteboard. Obviously calling the Dems "red" would have been invidious, so he switched the colors, though in my recollection he didn't say so. That's where it comes from.
Btw - there will always be power elite on both sides. This is politics in USA. But point is over time big gov’t won & now was are managing the damage inflicted & the damage that will be inflicted.
Also, red was Ronald Reagan's favorite color. It was noticed by the WH press corp that reporters who wore red got picked by him more often at press conferences.
You know what was Sinatra's favorite color? Orange.
The interior of his plane, El Dago, was orange, but I imagine you already knew that. I hope your bird is doing well.
As much as I find Sinatra one of the greatest American singers, orange is one of my least favorite colors. Almost as low as purple or pink or lavender.
Red ties were a GOP thing in the 80s. Trump just never changed his.
Thank you; I've wondered about the origins of "backward" red/blue for years.
Ah, but Dr Tighe, consider it in this way: by 2000, communism was comatose, at least. Red could signify red bloodedness, heartiness, and the like. Blue well signifies despondency, ambivalence, urbanity, possible suicide.
Networks have always used some colors or other. In 2000 it happened to be red and blue. The only difference is that people then polarized on that reference, which had never happened before.
Hi Theodore: I am fellow paisano at least on mom’s side. My grandma was a bonano. I mean both sides are now big gov’t & irrespective of color code. That is what I meant. Caio.
I’m glad you pointed out Justine Bateman—God bless her! The series of posts where she critiques lib TikTokers’ post-election videos is hilarious—using the driest sort of humor possible. But as someone somewhere also pointed out: she’s also trying to help them, using her experience as a filmmaker! Maybe the best example of “killing them with kindness” I’ve seen recently.
Not to overstate the case, but Taylor Lorenz is an example of everything wrong with journalism today, wrapped up in one neat package. Even my students, who are predisposed to agree with her, can see how much she hurts their cause as journalists.
One thing. Taylor Lorenz is not a journalist and never was. That she was taken as such by an organ as exalted as The Washington Post is a pretty precise measure of the corruption of that profession.
And she’s gone from the Post now. A freelance nut job.
Agree completely.
"This is such a perfect example of the moralistic, pushy Left patrolling the discourse."
Don't expect a let up before Jan. 20, but not necessarily with trans, which is such a hothouse issue that a few blasts of cold air are bound, I think, to kill it once institutional support is removed. It's immigration. Both in Times and on NPR there are stories and especially interviews readying the faithful for sob stories around mass deportations (which have to happen, and will be ugly, and can be laid precisely at the doorstep of Joe Biden). The press will spend the next 75 days droning how impossible deportations will be (they're not), and the human stories (which will be real) will multiply. Closing the border and, one can only hope, building the wall, are the easy part. I'm no professional, but it seems evident to me that they should go after criminals first, but I guess they're thinking it through.
The only upside to this is that the energy taken to keep their own temperature on the boil, and the rhetoric which will go with it, will further marginalize the 4B Democrats. Tim ("Dancing Queen") Walz felt called upon to make a speech in his native Minnesota after losing, which I suppose is reasonable enough. In it he makes an appeal for "unity". Sorry, but I would rather be dead than unified with someone who signs legislation enabling the State to take children away from their parents, mutilate them, or facilitate their eventual mutilation by drugging them, and then lies about it. In many ways he was a fitter face of what the Democratic Party has become than the top of the ticket.
Meanwhile, yes, the emergence of Mallory Keaton as a force for good was the cherry on the sundae this week. What she's been doing on X, besides flushing out Tay Tay Lorenz, is taking the 4B videos and "marking" them as would a film school teacher. Very funny. And learned. It's like finding out Monica Bellucci voted for Giorgia.
What the "Left" (for lack of a better term) is gearing up for, like you said, is a big-budget passion play of mass hysteria set to kick off the moment anyone takes a video of a bus being loaded with a bunch of migrants scheduled for deportation.
One step (as you said) will be the heart-tugging tales of these poor brown people who came here for a better life, how embedded they are in wherever they live, how they will have to have a tearful farewell w family, but once there are buses and/or detention camps—the Nazi/Hitler hysteria will make their reaction to Trump's MSG rally sound like a whisper—kids in cages! families separated! concentration camps!
And I think this reinforces another reason why Trump won: for upscale liberals and their media dopamine dealers, politics barely intersects with things like law and order, safe streets, the price of food, good schools etc (bc upscale liberals don't have to worry about these things), but is almost entirely about performing the (public) role of White Savior—whether of the poor brown migrant or the sacred Trans child. The fact that these people should have never been here in the first place, that Biden's border policy was an insane mistake, and that Our Democracy has spoken and wants them gone—all this is irrelevant compared to their status as Oppressed who need to be saved from Oppression. For upscale liberals politics now means getting a chance to publicly cosplay as either the French Resistance or as Freedom Riders or Black Panthers and reality or compromise have no chance against this deep psychic/emotional need.
Also, Monica Bellucci is a living goddess, she doesn't vote, she only gets worshipped and adored!
Yes, but some of the stories will be heart-tugging. There’s no way around that. NPR had someone who was in enforcement for Biden who said that ICE would come after Haitians and Guatemalans first (evidently Venezuela won’t take migrants back). Well, he would know, but I think they should come after criminals first, then after that those from north Asia and black Africa, and then after those who arrived 2021-2025. It’s what happens after that that’s going to be tough. All of these is at the doorstep of the Biden administration and the establishment GOP, but Trump is going to have to clean it up.
"I think they should come after criminals first, then after that those from north Asia and black Africa, and then after those who arrived 2021-2025."
If he could get even half of this done, along with closing the border as much as poss, it would be an enormous achievement. First he will have to deal with the Dem govs and mayors who will try to make this a Slave State/Free State reboot with Trump in the role of slave catcher. (Everything for liberals is re-enacting some historical drama where they play savior of the poor brown/black—is their deepest faith and the foundation of their morality and self-image.)
I was thinking maybe the Trump admin could just starve the "sanctuary states" of cash? Tell them if they want their migrants they will have to pay for them on their own with zero federal funds? I'm not sure is legal, but at least it will make them pay a price for their performance art.
That's a great idea. In reality closing the border is the easy part. It's the ones already here that are going to be challenge.
Despite the florid denunciations of our Brooklyn-Brookline-Berkeley betters, Americans are mostly fair and tolerant, which is why Biden was able to flood the country w migrants in the first place. Most people see someone poor who needs help, but is also willing to work, and give them the benefit of the doubt.
If Trump can just deport criminals and some of the more egregious recent border jumpers, esp anyone cartel-adjacent, that should go over ok. But I think people will have limited stomach for mass roundups, so Trump should just aim for the low-hanging fruit first and accept that at least half of Biden's migrants are most likely here for good.
I'm still waiting for a single Dem of significance to explain exactly why Biden and the Dems thought is was a good/smart idea to open the border to many millions of impoverished mostly unskilled and mostly non-English speaking migrants—but that's a whole different question.
Joe Rogan confronted Fetterman with, well, once you concede it’s cheap labor, you have to say you’re importing a new voting population. And Fetterman had nothing to say.
Americans also like lower prices, which is a big reason anti-illegal-immigrant measures never take the step of targeting employers of such labor-- though that would be more effective than any border wall would be.
Forget the border. Go after the employers of undocumented labor. If there were no jobs for these people they wouldn't be coming here, and those here would go home. We saw this during the Pandemic lockdowns, though we don't want to repeat that precise strategy. But so far every attempt to to attack the problem at the workplace has led to vast choruses of outrages, and the government has backed off.
The heart tugging is why I agree they should come after criminals first. There are also, and I assume an overlapping group, 1.3 million people with deportation orders.
I’ve told this story before, but, evidently, during the filming of The Passion Mel told the makeup guys that Mary Magdalene had to look more haggard during the crucifixion. He came back an hour later and told them to skip it. There was no way to make her look bad.
Have you seen what she looks like today, 60, with no work done?
oh i sure have—GODDESS!
Oh don’t be so sure she hasn’t had a tweak or two...European women are so much better at it.
Even upscale liberals pay the same food prices as the rest of us. If they're shopping at upscale stores (Whole Foods etc.) they're paying more.
The difference is they can afford the price increase without having to think twice. Working class people, especially ones with large families, have had to make hard choices because of the increased cost of groceries.
Truly rich people can afford to brush off price increases. But there are more than a few people with low six digit incomes who are living paycheck to paycheck (sometimes in pricey metro regions; sometimes just people who are spendthrifts, or who have had unlucky calamities force them to charge up their credit cards) and those people are also going to be hit hard by rising prices. I think we need to be careful about assuming that anyone who makes more money than we do is necessarily living on Easy Street.
But there are so many American citizens with Spanish surnames, Mexican and Puerto Rican, who want immigration controlled.
Yes, and there are two cable networks that will show nonstop footage of cute little brown kids screaming and their mothers tearing their hair out. It can be done, but it's going to be in the teeth of that.
Could be. I don't subscribe to any cable channels. Is that relevant to anything?
Just think, if Trump did not “lose” in 2020, we would not have JD as VP, and Elon, RFK Jr, Tulsi, and Vivek all ready to pitch in the next four years.
Yes. There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will.
The dysfunction of the first presidency would have continued with the post-Covid mess to clear up, which alone has made every incumbent government pay a high price. It was clever of Trump to let Biden take the flak for that and return with a better team and bigger mandate …
I think you're right; keeping the shrill rhetoric turned up to 11 since at least mid-2016 doesn't seem to have helped move the electoral needle one iota the way progressives wanted. "Never let a good crisis go to waste" may be true but not every freaking thing is a damn crisis.
I think the Dems, for all their self-claimed intelligence, were incredibly dumb when Trump won in 2016. They thought they had to attack him and try to block his every step.
If they were as smart as they claim, they would have played a charm offensive with him. They would have praised and flattered him. Then Trump's interior New York Moderate Democrat heart would have given them almost everything they wanted.
And they still haven't learned the lesson.
Smart thinking if they want their policies implemented more than they want power. But I'd say that is not the case.
Trump is their Emmanuel Goldstein. They must have an Emmanuel Goldstein.
Fair point, Linda. Hadn't considered they just want power.
Dan, their actions essentially robbed Trump of the first 2 years of his term. The illegal spying and constant pillorying via legacy media has a lot to do with the hangover of crazy among the Dems/Left.
One can hope that this election will finally bode ill for the poisonous division of Obama, but I'm not sanguine on that point. Relentless is a driving characteristic of the Left. To them EVERYTHING is political. So unpleasant but we can't just try to avoid them as a coping mechanism.
There is a reason that "Fight Fight Fight" resonates among those that voted for Trump.
Trump robbed himself of that time. He could have ignored the scandalmongering and gotten on with business. But he was woefully inexperienced and unprepared, and his colossal ego cannot stand anything negative being said about him.
Oh Jon...did you watch? Did you see the obstruction?
God bless you in any case
Obstruction? Huh? And watch what? You have no link to anything above.
I stand by what I said above. and have said many times. Other presidents have achieved significant things in the face of scandalmongering and legal maneuvers.
You're right, Dan. No other presidential candidate or president has ever had both the CIA and the FBI trained on him to subvert, first, his candidacy, and then, his presidency.
Sigh. What could the FBI and CIA to subvert an actual president? First off the president is their boss. Secondly all he has to do is appoint people to deal with that crap, while he gets on with the business he was elected for. This endless excuse making for Trump's incapacity has not aged well-- at this point it's like road kill left in the Florida sun for days.
"...so of the era that just ended on Tuesday. We on the Right don’t have to take this crap anymore. We never did, but we damn sure don’t now. Push back hard against these bullies, y’all. Their day is done. They don’t get to do this anymore."
Is it over? Trump's first term saw woke ideology on steroids. Yes many of us are tired of it, but your link to the CNN panel shows a doubling down, not a retreat into obscurity.
As you've been saying, their power comes from their control of institutions, not exclusively from Washington. Peter B. is right.
The appointment of Susie is of the utmost importance here. You need an iron hand, especially with what we know about Trump's powers of concentration and follow-up (though the statements he's been making about free speech, etc. post election are highly inspiring.)
It would require the highest degree of coordination, e.g., to time the deportations with testimony from a subpoenaed Mayorkas. That really is 4D chess and it requires professional skills beyond disloyal political generals like Kelly.
"We on the Right don’t have to take this crap anymore. We never did, but we damn sure don’t now. Push back hard against these bullies, y’all. Their day is done. They don’t get to do this anymore."
But they're sure as hell going to try.
It's all they know; they are convinced of their own moral rectitude, and that REQUIRES them to preach to the great unwashed. It's the white liberals' burden: "enlightening" the deplorables about how men can give birth, how women can have penises, and so forth.
They don't get that they have been rebuked. But: good. That means they won't reform, they will try the exact same shrieking harpie approach in 2026 and 2028. Shrill, accusatory, "you'll vote our way or else you're a racist/transhphobe/whatever."
That's SURELY they way to build an electoral majority, and I think all of us ought to encourage this strategy.
Couldn't agree more. This is just one battle not the end of a war.
One of my favorite things to do X is to point out to the die hard Kamala supporters is that they don’t get to emotionally manipulate us any more. We are done acting like the village idiots have something to contribute to the conversation and that they were never that special.
Identity politics needs to die an ugly death and never raise its ugly head again.
I get that it could be considered petty, but they need to know that we aren’t putting up with their behavior anymore and that they need to learn how to function in normal society. It does suck when your candidate loses, but the complete meltdowns are just mental.
People can vote for who they want, but it needs to be made clear that we aren’t tolerating the shaming and bullying anymore.
Being an individual matters a lot to all Americans.
There isn’t a narrow bandwidth for what a ‘good person’ is for most people. And the Left shrunk their bandwidth so much that normal people simply don’t fit into their political vision anymore.
I can disagree with people and not hate them as individuals.
I’m so glad Gen X pulled out the win for Trump. We grew up on hyper individualism. Most of us are very ‘live and let live’ until people go completely mental, like the Leftists did. I’m so ready for the ‘nice’ era of R politics to be over. We’ve tolerated too much for too long. I’m very ready to clean up this mess. I’m glad others are too!
I'm glad you had a good time in Delaware despite your health challenges.
Rod, you know me well, so in the following I'm using "we" to encompass the very large cohort of my fellow believers and travelers.
We are not the enemy. We are, perennially, the targets of the ignorant, those who are disinclined (unlike you) to try to engage us in dialogue and get better acquainted with what we actually believe and think. Your phrasing in today's post is borderline, in my opinion. You don't use explicit references, per se, but the connotations of your phrasing are inescapable.
I never blame such things, never you personally, for the backlash we face. We've entered a time when open expressions of hostility are becoming the norm. Have you seen the reporting on "your body, our choice"? Do we have to wait for direct expressions of such things, like vandalism and physical attacks? What happened recently in Amsterdam makes many of us very, very nervous.
So far, it is sparse and isolated, but that won't last long with our ultra-fast dissemination of what people say via the Internet. Hell, someone is promoting "your body, our choice" t-shirts and sweatshirts, and Amazon among other outlets are selling them with advertising.
I hate to say it, but I can't avoid it: it will get ugly. In the meantime, should any woman in my sight or hearing is targeted with any of that, I've already decided that I will go right to 10 on the anger scale, and there will be bruises and broken bones at the very least. My sisters, daughters, nieces and granddaughter deserve no less.
Is that some meme about abortion? I don't get what the issue is. There is not a snowball's chance in Hell that there will be a federal abortion ban, and Trump has said repeatedly that he would veto any such bill even on the off-chance that it manages to make it to his desk. (And I believe him: it's pretty obvious that he has no interest whatsoever in that sort of political albatross.) And abortion rights have been approved in pretty much every state where the issue has been put to a popular vote, with the measure only failing in Florida because it only got 57% rather than the requisite 60% in that case.
In short, abortion rights don't seem to be remotely under threat, and they even seem to have been broadly strengthened after the repeal of Roe, with state after state approving such rights by outright democratic mandate. Sounds like what you're referring to just amounts to cruel trolls harassing women who are hysterical about a non-issue, which is to say that they're both caught in a mutual doom loop that has no point of contact with reality.
So far, the reports I've seen about the "your body, our choice" thing is from high schools and college campuses. I'm trying very hard to ascribe it to male immaturity and sexual insecurity, and if the source of it should turn out to be the abortion issue, I must still assume that it is more about sex and its "availability" than about a direct connection to the abortion rights issues.
My honest opinion is that it is an ugly resurgence of the male practice of cat calls and wolf whistles. Mix in the normalization of the involuntary celibate (Incel) phenomenon, and you get an idea of my point of view here.
That makes sense. I guess I'd also wonder, though, if the type of liberal woman whose first instinct when she gets upset is to film herself and post it on TikTok is kind of, you know, asking to be trolled. (Not asking to be sexually harassed—there's no such thing. But asking to be trolled is probably a thing.) It's possible that these men and these women deserve each other.
I'm more than a bit confused about your upset liberal woman reference. I have seen no evidence to support the notion, let alone to support your implied blanket inclusion of "type of liberal woman". I'll certainly read what you have to say about that.
My main social circle is stage performance artists. Some few of them participate in explicit (in language and verbal imagery) performances. I don't know any of them who decided to do so from any sort of spur-of-the-moment motivation.
You haven't seen any of the videos? There are oodles of videos of young liberal women completely freaking out and crying and screaming at the camera about the results of the election, including insane claims about how all their rights are gonna be taken away (abortion foremost among them). And yes, one does wonder, "These couldn't have all been first takes, could they? I wonder how many attempts were made at this performance. . . ."
So, I mean to say that there could be a really toxic dynamic going on of the woman acting crazy and then a male troll sort of egging her on. But the videos are so off-the-wall that it's hard to feel like the women are totally innocent if that's what's happening. And you're saying it's coming out of high schools and college campuses, that sounds like about the right age range for the posting such videos on TikTok.
I must admit that I would expect you to not draw a conclusion based on volume (appearances and sound!). However, there is a long standing phenomenon which entails women calling the trolling "slut shaming", and reacting to that. They often cite Bettie Page and Mae West (among other women) as inspirational, flaunting themselves without shame and ignoring the trolling of their times. I'm not sure that's a direct rebuttal for you, but it seemed important to mention.
I hear the crying and screaming among my friends (very much so on Facebook). I also see them coming back later and being self-honest about how unproductive such things usually are.
Have you noticed that they always have septum nose rings? What's that all about?
My son, who is not religious, is a student, and works part-time as a tour guide in Japan, looking at temples, palaces, etc.
He says that US liberals have something wrong with them. They ask weird questions about the Buddhist position on transgender rights and so on. He got talking to one Californian woman, and said that his fiancee has been to Texas a lot, and has relatives there, and that he and she have sometimes thought about living there. She replied with "Oh, no, that's terrible; you can't get an abortion there". Imagine saying that to someone who's talking about a family future?
The good news is abortion amendments failed in 3 states (and sadly, passed in seven). They were Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota. Failed with less that fifty percent support in Nebraska and South Dakota.
I thought "your body, our choice" on T-shirts was a faminist critique charactering pro-life positions. I googled it. It's not. NIck Fuentes appears to have said "Your bodoy, my choice. Forever" the day after the election and it is being copied. Men (presumably) are posting that on tiktok - things like "Your body, my choice, cutie" as a response to women who speaks pro-abortion.
edit to add: "Your body, our choice is not to see a separate human being killed" is what we mean - we have no control over the woman's actual body in the way Frentes intimates. Click bating racist misogynist grifter.
Sounds like my take on it is directionally correct, then? Trolling it is. Really terrible trolling.
Very much so.
A lot of people take the rhetoric to refer to rape. If that’s what little piss ants like Nick Fuentes mean, they’d better watch it because red state guys have mothers, wives, sisters & daughters.
I’m too old to be harassed by these guys probably but if they tried saying that to me or to my daughters or granddaughter, it’d be “your balls, my foot.”
Is abortion the only right that you care about for the women in your life? How about the right to play a sport that they may have trained for since they were little girls only to be perennially defeated by a man whose ambition exceeds his abilities to compete with other men? Or to be permanently injured by same?
People can die from quite minor surgical procedures, oral surgery, podiatric surgery, etc either from anesthesia or sepsis. But the statistics for deaths during or after an abortion, which must occur, are never publicized. Every girl 16 and under having an abortion is the victim of statutory rape but no one asks whether the father is her teenaged boyfriend or a predator. Parents, husbands, boyfriends all force girls and women into choices they may deeply regret but no one is allowed to ask. Those shirts you describe are in bad taste but abortion will remain legal in most places as most Americans have decided it should. Is infanticide, or smothering or dismembering a full term baby really something worth fighting for?
The moral right for a woman to be sovereign in her body is a top-three motivation for the feminist movement. It covers marital rape (because men are in charge), the advent of the hysterectomy as a "treatment" for mental illness in women (see also the etymology of "hysterical"), and the original motivation for no-fault divorce, there being a very long time before that when no woman had the legal right to file for divorce.
Women's sports and transgender "invasion" of them is a red herring in this discussion. I absolutely believe in a level playing field in politics for women's sports, and allowing trans women to compete is demonstrably a violation of that level playing field.
Rape and statutory rape have a very tortured history. Two of my sisters were the victims of sexual assault, one of them twice, and after duly filing police reports no investigation happened. The entire thing is a strong remnant of my first point: men were sovereign, and women were their subjects. Consider this comparison: female sex workers are subject to criminal laws. Men are routinely slapped on the hand with sayings like "boys will be boys".
There are plenty of credible and some verified stories of men gathering in a circle around a rape in progress, and cheering it on or lining up to be next.
Every full-term fetus is evidence that the woman wants the baby. There are rare cases which prove this rule. The woman in Texas who died of sepsis along with her baby was denied treatment twice because they detected a fetal heartbeat, and the attending physicians were afraid of criminal prosecution. Never mind that they were wrong about that. A woman died for absolutely no medical reason.
If you witness infanticide, or smothering or dismembering, it falls on you to report it to the authorities. In the meantime, I have no interest in arguing with you about a point that has no objective evidence to support it. I will point out one fact that you can verify for yourself: no state in the Union legalizes late-term abortions for any reason other than a life-threatening condition. A woman died in Texas. What do you think about that?
I think it was a tragedy. I think it was medical malpractice. It is always unacceptable not to treat an emergency first and ask questions later whether those questions refer to insurance or law. But I do not believe it was publicized so it never happens again, a good outcome, but because it was politically expedient, a gift to a flailing campaign. Unfortunately for the dems Just Abortion, Okay? did not turn out to be the magic key to the White House.
Sure you will, tough guy. Sure you will.
I don't subscribe to the macho fallacy. I don't give warning. I do it. I wonder what you would do if the target was your sister.
Everyone has a plan until they've been punched in the face. Clearly you've never actually been punched in the face. Otherwise you'd be way more circumspect, even on the internet.
You'd also be more circumspect if you'd ever actually been in a situation where you were the one who punched somebody in the face. Interpersonal violence is a burden for the person who employs it that lingers, unless the person is a sociopath.
As for my sister, frankly, she could stand to be taken down a peg. She's a bit insufferable, to be perfectly honest. Thankfully she lives several hundred miles away and rarely comes around.
Been there, done that, had the bruises to show for it. I know how to avoid getting punched in the face.
I pity your sister, but she's lucky to be so far away from you.
That was a deft dodge of the question. Bravo.
Lighten up, Franklin...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ICMg8GV7Zs
Sure. I think you should try taking sexual harassment seriously. Be well.
Thanks for your thanks, Rod. Happy to help keep our scribe on the mend. Feel better!
Personally, I’m glad to see religion/witchcraft/occult ideologies coming to the forefront, replacing atheism and agnosticism as the flavor of the moment for the unsaved.
This pushes them towards a “hot or cold” mentality, which will force them to think about these positions/ideas instead of choosing to be “lukewarm”. I think it’s usually a quicker road to Christ for the true seeker.
My oldest son is in that boat today, and atheism/agnosticism gave him a place to land and “not decide”. Witchcraft and the like, forces the issue.
Go ahead Barnes and Noble, set the choice before the public in this clearer fashion than “God is Dead”.
“But if it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the LORD, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served, which were beyond the Euphrates River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”
Josh 24:15
I don't know Rosie--the Occult gets its hooks in one, and a person may never come out. Agnostics/atheists are sort of on the fence. People who get into the Occult are dealing with demons, whether they know it or not, and demons do not give up a person without a fight.
My kids grew away from the faith (they're back now, but it's not perfect), and I nagged them back into the church. Not continually, just from time-to-time. That, and setting the example of going to mass, and having a husband that was doing the same.
If my kids had started drifting into the Occult during this period, it would have been war.
And what if my kids went gay. War. I know, but as I've warned the kids "I'm a really bad candidate to be a parent of a gay kid."
Does that make me intolerant? Afterall, it's not all about me. That's right, it's about them, and I'm not having it because I have to answer to God: what did you do when you saw your kid turning gay? I treat gay people the way I treat all people (attempt to be polite and respectful, wishing all well), but not my kids, they're not getting my kids. Other than that, I've given the gay thing to God. It's not just one thing happening in the gay community--some are born that way (it seems some men are just born effeminate, just as some women are born mascultine (gay or not), but a lot of it is trauma and parental abandonment and/or abuse of one type or other.
I don't believe in transgendering anyone--meaning, I don't buy into the need for blockers and surgery for 99.999999% of what is going on in that department. I know, there are very rare cases of ambiguous sex. I'll leave that to the medical experts and ethicists to figure out. But the broad promotion of "gender theory" is flat out demonic in my book. What it attempts to do is to interpose the government between the parent and child. Unfortunately, there are some transhuesen-by-proxy wacko MOTHERS out there who trans their kids--these people are sickening to me. I don't want any surgeries/puberty blockers except in the rarest of rare cases of sexual ambiguity because of genetic abnormalities.
"I don't believe in transgendering anyone."
The practice should be illegal. I don't think that's a radical position, I hope to see it happen before I die.
I agree, Theodore, and the only way to get it out of the curriculum is to break up the DOE and get teacher ed out of the hands of the teachers' unions. I'm for school vouchers. The schools would have to be certified, so right there, caution, because when the Teachers' Unions are locked out of the front door, they'll try to get back in through the back door of "school certification" once we go to vouchers. I hope we do go to vouchers. It would be the first step toward vanquishing "woke" from the curriculum.
You are very smart lady. It's always important to think three steps ahead, because they do. But everything I see coming out Mar a Lago is that Trump is dead serious on delivering.
I agree, and also think we should have much higher standards for who is admitted to teacher education programs.
Thank you Anne, for your thoughtful reply, and your personal experience - it is always encouraging to hear of another mother who has seen a child return to Christ!
I agree with you that the Atheist is “on the fence”, and also that demons don’t give up without a fight. The truth is, the one “on the fence” is also in the clutches of the demonic, but it’s a different look. It’s a different fight. And I think it’s more deceptive.
Consider Rev 3:15-17a :
“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot. 16So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of My mouth. 17Because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have no need of anything,” and you do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked,”
Swimming in lukewarm ideologies give a false sense of security, because the person is lulled into believing nothing is happening “beneath the surface”. These people are in a “stupor”, unaware of the danger, that they are still on the road to hell.
This is in contrast to actively participating and pursuing the demonic. Those people are primed, if you will, to recognize the Truth.
CS Lewis does a wonderful job delving into this topic in the entertaining and though-provoking book, “The Screwtape Letters”.
But I also know that God knows how to reach the “lost lambs” and I trust Him. I rejoice with you with the return of your children, and I’m grateful you followed His leading to be persistent with inviting them back to church. Sounds like the Lord really used it!💗
I am a huge fan of CS Lewis. I have read almost all of his nonfiction (outside of his academic books on Middle Age Literature) and some of his fiction. Matter of fact, Lewis won me over in my mid-twenties, along with encountering a few Christians who led me back (they were both Prot, but they got me back in the RCC! Ha! ) Lewis has converted tens of millions of people. He is like a Prot saint in my book.
Michael Heiser has an interesting YouTube video about the real meaning of that scriptural passage (hot or cold vs lukewarm) - it's very insightful, with a different theological take than what I, at least, always heard in church.
You're right about the challenges, Rod. Aaron Renn says that Trump could get elected only because we're in the "negative world" (negative about Christianity)
Somehow I find that reassuring.
Rod, your theme song should be "Get Around" by the Beach Boys. "Get around, get around, I get around, I get around wheeeee ooooh." I hope you get to whisk through security (my hubby used to have some "world traveller" classification that whistked him through security when he was flying all over the globe all of the time. (He enjoys travel. Me, not so much. ) I think it costs money to get preapproved as a "world traveller" (of course) who thereafter one doesn't have to strip down to board a plane. Also, I hope you're wracking up frequent flier miles and credit card points.
I am optimistic about Trump's second chance. I hope the House isn't getting stolen--I am reading here and there the House races are still indeterminate. Gulp. Because if the Dems somehow steal the House, they could use the budget to ring out "concessions" and stop a lot of Trump's agenda like removing the illegals, starting with the criminals and gang members. The GOP COULD have done this with Biden (hold up funding to force compromise), but the GOP tends to be the stupid party. The House (if stolen) could refuse to certify the election. So, while we're all feeling relief, prayers and fasting must continue to protect Trump and so that we are to make the reforms to preserve the country.
Steve Scalise thinks the House is ok.
Rep. Jamie Raskin is salivating to somehow refuse to certify the election. We must continue to pray. The Dems are getting desperate. And Marc Elias is a master mind of election theft.
They defeated Elias in Pennsylvania.
I think it's important to make a distinction between the institutional Dems and the media. The first are far to savvy not to see what has happened, unless they're real morons like Schiff.
Not that much in politics actually ticks me off, because our government has become a uniparty and even the pols who want to be honest are completely thwarted by having to prostitute themselves to even try to get something good done. I did not used to be this cynical, but there you go - history of the last few decades. But I was completely incensed when I heard that Schiff's campaign funneled a whole lot of money into support of Steve Garvey in the primary in California, in order to force Katie Porter out (because of the stupid "top two" rule that my fellow citizens voted for as one of many crazy initiatives it is so easy to get on the ballot here) - forcing out one of his own party to assure himself a win in the general election (Garvey was a non-starter and everyone knew it). I was still mad about that dastardly underhanded, unethical and mercenary move by Schiff, and I wrote in Katie Porter on Tuesday just for spite.
Dana
All anyone has to say to silence Jamie Raskin is "January 6."
Not so, Charlie, he says he will make sure Trump isn't certified by claiming he is an insurrectionist based on Jan 6. (Jan 6 was organized by the Feds-- who is Ray Epps? Pelosi was in on the plan.) It will not fly perhaps unless the Left manages to steal the House.
I can't think who is more delusional, Jamie Raskin thinking he's going to pull off such arrant nonsense, or you thinking he is seriously going to try. Whatever, its not going to happen. January 6 was organized by a Fed ... he occupied the office of President of the United States. Of course its not going to fly.
This morning I saw in the local paper that a few national Dems are talking about "the election was stolen, there's been fraud, twenty million votes don't just disappear like that." They're wrong of course, indulging in the same sore loser sour grapes stuff the Trump camp did in 2020. It actually discredits both claims, they are so similar, so speculative, so ill-founded, and to those who know the election process, so impossible. Votes don't disappear, but voters become disenchanted to drop out in large numbers.
So the Democrats are trying to steal the House but somehow they neglected to steal the Senate & the White House? That doesn’t make any sense. People don’t like Congress in general but they like or at least tolerate, their own Congress critter. Anyone who’s ever worked the polls knows that every ballot, in person or mail in, has to match a name on the voter rolls. Poll watchers are a mix of R, D, and Independent. Just take the win. Voter fraud happens but not on a large scale. Even Republicans knew this in 2020. Except for some sore headed Dem conspiracy weirdos, Democrats know this in 2024. Saying it’s cheating only when your side loses is childish no matter which side does it.